Byzantine era icons in the interior of the Church of the Holy Savior in Istanbul. / Credit: Shutterstock
ACI MENA, Feb 13, 2024 / 11:00 am (CNA).
After serving as a museum for more than 79 years, the Turkish government is proceeding with plans to make the Church of the Holy Savior in Istanbul a mosque.
Mirroring the 2020 reversion of the Hagia Sophia, prayers and Islamic rites will be performed once again in the ancient church, according to Fides, the information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies.
The Church of the Holy Savior, also known as Chora Church, is recognized as one of the most important Byzantine gems in the world and is adorned with many unique icons and frescoes.
Turkish media, particularly the Islamist daily Yeni Şafak, initially reported the mosque would reopen for Islamic prayers on Feb. 23, 2023. However, the Turkish Directorate General of Institutions within the government’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism denied the report, affirming that the opening date remains unannounced.
The museum-to-mosque conversion project began in 2020, with plans to implement it by October of that year. Restoration work delayed the project. According to Turkish media, this long-running initiative, dubbed the “Kariye Mosque,” has finally come to fruition.
The Church of the Holy Savior in Chora in Istanbul, Turkey. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Sitting in the northeast of Istanbul’s historic center near Adrianople Byzantine Gate, the Church of the Holy Savior was built in the 12th century and restored in the early 14th century. After the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans kept the building as is until its conversion to a mosque in 1511. At that time, the magnificent frescoes and icons were completely plastered over.
At the end of World War II, archeologists and historians uncovered the long-hidden masterpieces on the walls. In 1945, the building became a museum and religious practices inside were banned.
However, in August 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reversed the 1958 decision that established the museum, paving the way for its return to an Islamic place of worship.
This story was first published by ACI Mena, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Alex Schadenberg speaks with “EWTN News Nightly” Host Tracy Sabol on Feb. 13, 2024. / Credit: “EWTN News Nightly”
CNA Staff, Feb 14, 2024 / 15:30 pm (CNA).
The director of the Euthanasia… […]
A screenshot from Live Action’s new 2363 video, which details the disturbing reality of surgical abortions. / Live Action YouTube video
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 4, 2021 / 15:52 pm (CNA).
A new pro-life campaign is highlighting the number of unborn babies destroyed in abortion each day in the United States: 2,363. That number takes on a personal meaning for Lila Rose, who is leading the initiative while more than eight months pregnant.
“I think becoming a mom has definitely made me even more passionate about fighting for the lives of children and working to protect them,” the head of Live Action, a national pro-life organization, told CNA. “It makes it that much more personal to experience pregnancy and a little life growing within, and to realize that there is a daily death toll of children like mine of 2,363 a day.”
Live Action’s campaign, 2363, will educate millions about abortion through ads and marketing in four major cities, Rose said: New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Jackson, Mississippi.
Already, she said, the 2363 campaign has inspired pro-life legislation. On Tuesday, Ohio State Rep. Jena Powell introduced the 2363 Act, or House Bill 480. The bill would ban abortions statewide, except in cases where the woman’s life is at risk. Modeled after Texas’ abortion ban, which the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about on Nov. 1, the proposed legislation would allow private citizens to sue anyone who performs or assists with an abortion.
Rose pointed to the 2363 campaign video, which provides details on how abortions are performed, as an instrument in changing hearts and minds. The video features obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Anthony Levatino, who partnered with Live Action to describe abortion procedures. Now a pro-life advocate, Levatino previously performed an estimated 1,200 abortions.
“The abortionist uses this clamp to grasp an arm or a leg,” Levatino says during the video, describing a second-trimester surgical abortion, or dilation & evacuation (D&E) to viewers. “Once he has a firm grip, the abortionist pulls hard in order to tear the limb from the baby’s body.”
He identifies the most difficult part as “extracting the baby’s head” which is “grasped and crushed.” At the end, “the abortionist then collects the baby parts and reassembles them to make sure that there are two arms, two legs, and all the pieces.”
After watching this video, the number of people who listed their position as “abortion should never be legal” increased by 11%, from 33% to 44%, Live Action found. Sixty-two percent of viewers said they viewed abortion more negatively after watching.
“These are the public opinion shifts we’re looking for across the country where people become 100% anti-abortion in support of complete legal protection for the pre-born,” Rose stressed.
Showing abortion for what it is saves lives, she added.
<p>Lila Rose, founder of Live Action. Courtesy of Live Action</p>
“I think most people want to do what’s right,” Rose said, “and when they find out what a violent act abortion is against the innocent child and how unjust that is and how damaging that is, then many of them change their position on abortion and go from apathetic to passionate, or go from pro-choice to pro-life.”
She called 2,363 “a number that every American needs to know.”
“That’s the daily average of the leading death toll in the United States, higher than heart disease, cancer, or COVID-19,” Rose stressed.
In addition to educating the public, the campaign website, 2363.org, connects women in need with resources and equips pro-life citizens to engage their communities, Rose said of the campaign’s “multi-faceted approach.”
As a pro-life advocate and as a mom, Rose envisions a future “where my kids can grow up in a country that respects children and human life and sees pregnancy as a gift, and supports mothers and fathers instead of rejecting new lives and throwing them away.”
A Vatican flag, with the incorrect design likely drawn from Wikipedia, and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. / Bohumil Petrik/ACI
St. Louis, Mo., Apr 8, 2023 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
The flag of Vatican City, with its distinctive yellow and white, is instantly recognizable to many Catholics. Likely far fewer people, though, have scrutinized the papal coat of arms on the right-hand side, instead taking the intricate design — which includes famous crossed keys — for granted.
As it turns out, there’s a good chance that the coats of arms on many of the Vatican flags you’ve seen out in the world are rendered incorrectly. And it took until 2023 for the internet to start taking notice.
Imagine you wanted to print your own version of the Vatican flag. Where would you go to find a high-quality picture of one? If you’re like most internet users, your first stop would probably not be the Vatican’s official (but admittedly outdated) vatican.va website. You’re probably going to pull up Wikipedia, one of the world’s most visited websites and an endless storehouse of free image content. Flagmakers the world over appear to have done so over the years.
Imagine many people’s surprise, then, to discover that the image of the “Flag of Vatican City” displayed on Wikipedia has been wrong several times over the years, most recently from 2017 to 2022. (It was also wrong from 2006–2007.)
What is “wrong” about these flags, you might ask? It’s a small detail in the grand scheme of things but easy to spot once you know about it. The erroneous Wikipedia file includes a red disk at the bottom of the papal tiara as well as a different shade of yellow on portions of the coat of arms.
The anonymous Wikipedia editor who changed the look of the flag in 2017 wrote that he or she did so for “color correction” purposes, noting that the Vatican’s coat of arms includes the red at the bottom of the tiara. The only problem? The Vatican’s official flag design renders the coat of arms differently, with the circular bottom of the tiara in white.
The image was reverted to the correct one in 2022, but the damage was done. A casual internet search will turn up dozens of Vatican flags for sale that clearly used the incorrect image downloaded from Wikipedia. The incorrect flag has even made its way into emojis. (This whole situation gained attention last month after a Reddit user made a post about it.)
An inexpensive Vatican flag available for sale on Amazon that makes use of the incorrect Wikipedia flag design. Amazon/Screenshot
Father William Becker, pastor at St. Columbanus Parish in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, read the Reddit post with interest and amusement. Becker, a self-described “flag guy,” has studied the Vatican flag for years and even wrote an entire book about it. He has fond memories of raising the yellow and white colors over his alma mater, the North American College in Rome.
Becker told CNA that the saga of the Vatican flag on Wikipedia demonstrates a need for the Vatican to step in and clarify exactly what its flag should look like, especially considering the fact that Catholic churches all over the world display the Vatican flag.
It was precisely this lack of clarity on the official design of the Vatican flag that led Becker to create a website detailing, as best as he could, the correct design for the flag.
“Cultural communities in general have turned to flags in a stunning way,” Becker commented, citing in part a proliferation of cheaply made, mass-produced flags. And, anecdotally, there seems to be an ever-increasing interest in the Vatican flag as a way for Catholics to claim an identity, whether by flying a flag at home, waving it at a papal event, or by putting one in their social media profile picture.
The Vatican flag. Bohumil Petrik/CNA
Perhaps surprisingly, the Vatican flag is less than 100 years old, as is Vatican City itself. For more than a millennium before 1870, the pope ruled over the Papal States, large regions mainly within present-day Italy. After the Vatican lost control of the Papal States, it found itself a tiny island surrounded by an acrimonious Italy. It took nearly 60 years until the ratification of the Lateran Accords of 1929 ushered in harmony between the Vatican and Italy, and the creation of the world’s smallest sovereign country.
In the days of the Papal States, many different flags were used, but the yellow and white color scheme was a common feature. Becker said the modern design was first used by the merchant fleet in the Papal States from 1825 to 1870. In 1929, that design was chosen as the new flag of Vatican City, the sovereign country.
“It took a while in 1929 to get some flags made. The techniques of mass production weren’t available yet, and so it would have been a matter of sewing up some flags and fitting out buildings with flag staffs,” Becker noted, saying that during this time and for years afterward there was quite a bit of variation between the Vatican flags people flew, perhaps even more so than today.
“That’s kind of common with other countries too, especially those that don’t really take pains to standardize their design. [Nowadays] a flagmaker is likely to go to a source like Wikipedia, and it may vary in its accuracy,” Becker told CNA.
The same flag chosen in 1929 was reconfirmed in a revised Vatican constitution, issued by Pope John Paul II in 2000. The original Vatican flag was actually square, as indeed the official version is today. Since roughly the 1960s, though, buildings began to fly oblong state flags that followed Italy’s flag proportions, probably because most Vatican flags at the time were mass-produced there.
The flag has special significance beyond the walls of Vatican City as a marker for the Vatican’s extraterritorial properties, of which there are more than a dozen. These properties, which include major basilicas such as St. Paul Outside the Walls and St. Mary Major, are marked as the Vatican’s through their flying of the papal flag.
Becker said he hopes his website will serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking for the exact Vatican flag design, at least until the Vatican issues some kind of clarification on what exactly the flag should look like.
“The papal flag is interesting because on the one hand, the Vatican is such a small state, but the papal flag is seen all over the world. Anywhere there’s a Catholic church, you might be likely to run into a papal flag,” he said.
“It would be nice if somebody at the Holy See could, through their website or wherever, make some design specifications more available … design specifications that manufacturers could rely on a bit more.”
The mosaics in this church are among the most important surviving pieces of Byzantine art–cited in innumerable reference books. Just as in “taking back” Hagia Sophia, the current regime in Turkey is hell-bent on extinguishing the nation’s Christian past, for political advantage. Don’t expect any foreign criticism of this cultural vandalism.
Turkey has been moving towards Islamic fundamentalism for many years now. Sad. Since the rise of Islam means destruction of any non-muslim art, expect these priceless works of art to be destroyed. Intelligent Christians in both the US and Europe should avoid travel and vacations to Turkey. Travel there helps support this religious intolerance with tourism dollars. Say ‘No” to Turkey.
In 1453 the Ottomans covered the mosaics in Hagia Sophia church with whitewash except for the prominent angel mosaics in order to turn it into a mosque. The whitewashed mosaics were uncovered when it became a museum in the 1920s under the Republic. Since Hagia Sophia was recently changed from a museum to a mosque, what has happened to the angels and other mosaics? That may tell us what will happen to the beautiful Chora church.
The mosaics in this church are among the most important surviving pieces of Byzantine art–cited in innumerable reference books. Just as in “taking back” Hagia Sophia, the current regime in Turkey is hell-bent on extinguishing the nation’s Christian past, for political advantage. Don’t expect any foreign criticism of this cultural vandalism.
Another wonder from the “religion of peace”
Turkey has been moving towards Islamic fundamentalism for many years now. Sad. Since the rise of Islam means destruction of any non-muslim art, expect these priceless works of art to be destroyed. Intelligent Christians in both the US and Europe should avoid travel and vacations to Turkey. Travel there helps support this religious intolerance with tourism dollars. Say ‘No” to Turkey.
In 1453 the Ottomans covered the mosaics in Hagia Sophia church with whitewash except for the prominent angel mosaics in order to turn it into a mosque. The whitewashed mosaics were uncovered when it became a museum in the 1920s under the Republic. Since Hagia Sophia was recently changed from a museum to a mosque, what has happened to the angels and other mosaics? That may tell us what will happen to the beautiful Chora church.
Islam is always and everywhere martial and imperial.