One thought on “Equal Rights”

  1. re: muslim treatment of christians
    actually the Pope is referring to muslim treatment of catholics and maronites. orthodox christians get along just fine with muslims by and large for many reasons too complicated to list in a blog, but suffice it to say that during the crusades the emperor of the eastern roman empire was always willing to make truces with the muslims and be reasonable with them whereas the latin crusaders of the frankish, english and german states, guided by the pope, were always on the offensive.
    while they eventually learned to make truces, as the recent ridley scott film shows, they never could get used to it and radical elements were always opposed to living with the muslims in harmony.
    it’s worth nothing that the sultan of the ottoman empire held as one of his crowns the crown of emperor of the eastern roman empire, and thus technically the eastern roman empire did not expire until the death of the sultanate in 1923 with the proclamation of the modern turkish state.
    the patriarchate for orthodox christians existed under the protection of the ottoman sultant for 470 years from 1453-1923 and was posted and delegated throughout the middle east as the sole and exclusive representative of christianity, including of course the church of the holy sepulchre in the Palestine.
    The history since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire has been far more complex. Lebanon was a largely maronite catholic state but was destroyed in 1975. There really isn’t a functional catholic church anywhere else in the middle east except for Eritrea, whose separatism from Ethiopia has been challenged since 1935 by Mussolini, the Pope, Hitler and more recently by the US on religious and ethnic grounds notwithstanding that the Ethiopians were the first or second country in the world to endorse christianity after the armenians and before the romans, and are one of the oldest christian churches in the world.
    –art kyriazis
    –philly

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