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this page Newsletters - Acts of Terror and the Family
Turkey
Editorial Note.
Father Andrea Santoro was a priest from the one Catholic church in the
city of Trabzon. He was shot and killed while praying in his parish. A
teenager has been arrested and is said to have been influenced by the cartoons
lampooning the Prophet Mohammed. But many questions remain unanswered.
It seems to me a bit strange that I, a religious of consecrated life, have been asked to give a contribution for a magazine dedicated to families. But I am convinced that the true family is the place where each of us has placed the treasure of his heart, a space open to a meeting of a specific person as in a couple, or a meeting that renews itself in every person we are asked to love as God would. I think that in this second perspective we can see the life of a consecrated monk or nun as someone who very soon discovers a brotherhood with other brothers and sisters who, from different starting points, have decided to live a life of more universal solidarity and partnership. We are not always given the possibility to enjoy the beauty and the richness of this brotherhood that creates an “enlarged” family, but I can say I have experienced them in many ways, during my religious life, first of all in the religious community I belong to, that is the Black Friars (Dominicans Brothers). However, a more touching experience of this deep brotherhood for me occurred here in Turkey, where I have been living for more than two years, on the day of the killing of my friend, Fr. Andrea Santoro, on February the 5th of this year, in Trabzon, on the Black Sea. Andrea was not a Black Friar, but a common perception had soon brought us to a mutual understanding; we can’t just live side by side in mere tolerance in a land where we are foreigners and a tiny minority in our religious creed. Though miles distant from one another (he in the North East and I in Istanbul), and living in different contexts, we tried to make true our wish to meet one another and from time to time we could enjoy each other’s company.
Then the tragic news you don’t want to believe, a feeling of deep uneasiness in receiving it through a cold press bulletin, and then a journalist who is already there, asking questions, without even giving you the time to cope with your inner ordeal. It takes only a few moments before you realise how much the loss of a dear person, even though not of your blood, has made your few certainties shake from their very basis. You go back to your memories, not many, of the moments shared and you think of your common efforts to share signs of hope with others. You would like to find someone to blame for all of this, but then you see too many are already uttering their harsh words of condemnation. You understand, then, that the real challenge is to be able to run away from all forms of extremism in judging responsibilities, as well as in viewing the religious or lay contrasts. You are left with a deep wish to “make memory” of the one passed away, to do all you can so that the things he lived for will not get lost. You are faced with your daily challenges: meeting the others, fighting against fear, poverty, loneliness, lack of values. These are the enemies we must defeat in order to promote a peaceful co-existence of all human beings. That is why, since that 5th of February, Andrea has become even closer to me: he is the companion of my journey. He is here, in Istanbul, to keep alive his dream of a possible co-existence of believers in different faiths, through my/your poor witnessing of our Christian faith. At the same time, Andrea enlarges the universal family of our brothers and sisters who have preceded us in the final encounter, for them already come to its fulfilment. The upsetting farewell becomes an “A-Dieu”: a renewed appointment for an unbreakable brotherhood.
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