[Editor's note: This coverage of the pope's visit to Istanbul is made possible by exclusive arrangement with Inside the Vatican Magazine. To hear an interview with Dr. Robert Moynihan, visit CE Today with John Morales.]
The whole question of prayer and adoration is a mysterious one. How should men and women worship? Who is worthy of worship? How should men and women pray, and when, and where… and why?
Yesterday, here in Istanbul, in a remarkable way, these questions were highlighted – if not answered – by two very different moments of Pope Benedict XVI's historic trip to Turkey.
The first "moment" was the solemn, majestic, three-hour Orthodox liturgy (a Mass according to the ancient Byzantine rite) filled with solemn chants and gestures.
Benedict attended the liturgy yesterday morning to celebrate the Feast of St. Andrew (November 30) at the Orthodox Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in the Phanar district of Istanbul – the same place where he prayed together with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew two days ago.
What was the "essence" of this "moment"? One explanation is given beautifully in the missal booklet that was provided for those who attended the historic liturgy.
"The Divine Liturgy is indeed a recurrence of the salvific sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ," the introduction of the booklet says. (As I was reading this booklet, which Father Alexander Karloutsos, an American Greek Orthodox priest, gave to me not long before the pope arrived, my old colleague Delia Gallagher, who is now CNN's Faith and Values correspondent, noticed me from the balcony, and joined me just next to Patriarch Bartholomew, who had come out to the vestibule of the church to await the pope.)
"The believer participates truly in the Divine Liturgy when he is put on the Cross with Him and when he is raised with Him; Him Who wants the salvation of everybody and Who desires everyone to come to the realization of the truth…. Therefore, the person who does not desire, out of love unto death the salvation of all his fellow people, just and unjust, good and wicked, faithful and unfaithful, honest and dishonest, always in repentance of course, cannot identify himself, or herself, with the spirit of Christ."
So the essence of the first "moment" of worship for the pope today was Christ Himself.
Underlining What Unites Christians and Muslims
The second "moment" truly was just a moment. It lasted only a few seconds, and occurred in complete silence. It occurred during Benedict's visit to the famed "Blue Mosque" of Istanbul, renowned throughout the world for its grandeur and beauty.
And, though the first moment was historic for Catholic-Orthodox relations, it was the second which may go down in history as one of the most significant of Benedict's pontificate.
And this shows that, in such matters, external, visible signs may be of less importance than the moment's inner meaning. For the inner meaning of a thing is something that cannot be seen or heard, but only understood with the mind, or heart (or perhaps half-understood).
At the entrance of the mosque, Benedict took off his shoes, as is the custom. And he walked forward into the great expanse in his stocking feet, wearing his golden pectoral cross in full view over his white cassock. (It was the second time a pope had entered a Muslim place of worship; Pope John Paul II visited a mosque in Damascus, Syria, in 2001.)
Beside Benedict was Mustafa Cagrici, the grand mufti of Istanbul. He was Benedict's guide, explaining to him the history and architecture of the mosque, built by Sultan Ahmet I in the early 1600s.
When the two reached the "mihrab" niche that points the way toward Mecca, the mufti turned to Benedict and said he was going to pray. (Whether the pope knew in advance that the mufti was going to do this, is not clear.)
"In this space everyone stops to pray for 30 seconds, to gain serenity," the mufti said.
And then the mufti closed his eyes and began to pray.
The pope stood alongside him, bowed his head and, for a moment, waited, silent, motionless.
And then he began to move his lips, just a bit.
Silently.
There was no sound, no words spoken audibly.
"It was an unforgettable moment," my colleague, Serena Sartini – an Italian journalist from Florence who writes for Inside the Vatican and was standing a few feet from the pope as he prayed – told me yesterday evening as we ate dinner together. "There was no sound at all, just the sound of all the camera shutters – click, click, click, echoing through the stillness. I've never heard anything like it."
Benedict's moving lips were captured by television cameras and transmitted by satellite instantaneously around the world, to the ends of the earth.
For this moment, Benedict was not teaching, or explicating, or lecturing. He was not debating historical events and their meaning. He was not the "German professor," the "professor pope."
He was "the pope of prayer."
But he was praying in a very unusual place, for a pope: in a Muslim mosque. One of the leading Muslim mosques in the world. And mosques are places dedicated to Allah, not to the Trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Was this right?
Perhaps the pope was not really "praying" at all? Perhaps he was just "meditating"? Was this possible?
No, because when the two men continued on their way (as Serena, who was there and could hear everything, related to me), the pope said to the mufti, "Thank you for this moment of prayer." There seems no doubt, then, that Benedict was indeed praying.
The pope's spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, was asked about this later by journalists. Was it really a prayer?
At first Lombardi seemed to hesitate, saying "the pope paused in meditation, and certainly he turned his thoughts to God."
Then he said that this could be called a moment of personal prayer, but one which did not include any of the exterior signs of Christian prayer, like a sign of the cross. In this way, Lombardi said, the pope underlined what unites Christians and Muslims, rather than any differences.
"In this sense it was a personal, intimate prayer to God," Father Lombardi said, which "can easily be expressed with his mind and with his thoughts also in a mosque, where many people cultivate the same spiritual attitude." The essence of this argument would seem to be that the pope – or any Christian – may pray to God anywhere, not just in a Christian church, but even outdoors, even in a prison cell, even in a non-Christian place of worship, like a mosque.
Why would Benedict do this, and risk scandalizing some Christians, who may feel it was wrong of him to pray in a building specifically not dedicated to the triune God of Christian faith?
The answer seems to lie, in part, in Benedict's somber, realistic evaluation of the present threat of war and socio-political conflict for the whole human family in this "globalized" world, and the consequent urgent need for human beings to find a way to live in peace together, so that our children and their children may not inherit a world of blood and iron, ruined by war and its consequences.
The Pope of "Istanbul Prayer"
Some analysts are beginning to argue that the threat Benedict opposes is more modern secularism than Islam. That is, Benedict opposes a society with no religious faith at all, no sense of the transcendent, the holy, more even than a society with a very different religious faith and law, if that society still has a profound sense of the holy and the transcendent. (Recall that much of Benedict's September 12 Regensburg talk was a call to the secularized West to return to a religious faith and a conception of the transcendent that it has abandoned over the past two or three centuries.)
"Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary," Philip Blond of St. Martin's College, Lancaster, England, wrote recently. "Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe's common political project to the growing secularization of European culture…. Thus Benedict's true purpose in Turkey is that of uniting all the monotheistic faiths against a militant and self-consciously destructive secular culture…. Far from being anti-Muslim, the pope views Islam as a key cultural ally against the enlightenment liberalism that for him corrodes the moral core of Western society."
If this is so, it would explain a great deal.
It would explain why Benedict is reaching out to the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, but also to all the other Orthodox Churches (and, in a very special way, to the Russian Orthodox, the most numerous of all the Orthodox Churches, even though there are rivalries between Constantinople and Moscow, the "second Rome" and the "third Rome").
And it would explain why he prayed in the mosque, after asking the Islamic world in September to reject violence.
At the end of the visit, the pope presented the mufti with a framed mosaic of doves.
"This picture is a message of brotherhood in the memory of a visit that I will surely never forget," Pope Benedict said.
And so it was that November 30, 2006, the very day Pope Benedict prayed in the morning with Patriarch Bartholomew for Christian unity after one thousand years of division, also was the day when Pope Benedict moved his lips in a private prayer, for an intention known only to himself – and in so doing overturned the image created of him in the Muslim world during the past few weeks.
From the pope of the "Regensburg insult" (though certainly Benedict intended no insult), Benedict had become the pope of the "Istanbul prayer."
Of such significance may be a few words, even when not spoken aloud. Of such significance may be a prayer, even when it is only for a few seconds.
Moments before entering the Blue Mosque, Pope Benedict had visited the Hagia Sophia Museum, an architectural masterpiece I myself was able to visit the previous morning.
The Hagia Sophia ("Hagia" means "holy" in Greek, and "Sophia" means "wisdom," so "the Church of Holy Wisdom"), was converted to a mosque in the 15th century after the conquest of Constantinople. After the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire fell and Turkey became a secular state, it was turned into a museum, and remains a museum today, with no religious ceremonies whatsoever.
Before leaving, he stopped to write in the museum's guest book.
"In our diversity, we find ourselves before faith in the one God. May God enlighten us and help us find the path of love and peace," he wrote.
And so on St. Andrew's Feast Day, the pope visited three great religious shrines in the space of a single day: (1) the Cathedral of St. George, where he was present at the celebration of an Orthodox Christian Mass; (2) the Hagia Sophia, once the greatest cathedral of Christendom, later, and for almost 500 years, one of the leading mosques in the world, but now a museum where, public worship being forbidden, he wrote a petition to God in the guest book; and (3) the Blue Mosque, one of the glories of Islam, where his lips moved silently in an unknown prayer.
