Dr. Vasileios Th. Meichanetsidis

At the end of this month, the new Roman Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, will travel to Turkey to join the Ecumenical Patriarch—the Archbishop of Constantinople–New Rome, Bartholomew—in commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. That council, convened in 325 by Emperor Constantine the Great, was one of the defining moments in Christian history. Tradition holds that Constantine was encouraged in this great endeavor by his mother, Saint Helena, the devout Christian Augusta who came from Drepanon in Bithynia, the very region where the city of Nicaea is found.

For those who may not know—understandably, since we now live in deeply secular times—the First Council of Nicaea holds a central place in both Church and world history. It is famous for many legitimate reasons, but above all for defining the biblical foundation of the Christian faith regarding the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Nicaea was only the beginning. That first council was followed by six more Ecumenical Councils, all convened in Constantinople and Asia Minor. For centuries, this region served as one of the great theological, cultural, and spiritual heartlands of the early Christian world—truly, a “matrix Ecclesiae,” a birthplace of the Church.

Asia Minor was once the most deeply Christian land of the Greco-Roman world. For nearly two thousand years it was home to apostles, saints, councils, monasteries, and flourishing Christian communities.

All of this changed after the Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered the region. Through a long and often brutal process—what many historians describe as a sustained Islamic jihad—Asia Minor was gradually transformed, from the 11th to the 20th century, into a predominantly Muslim land.

This transformation was not accidental. It unfolded through a wide range of methods:

• recurring massacres of Christian populations,

• enslavement and large-scale slave trading of Christian captives (centuries before the colonial slave trade),

• campaigns of forced conversion into Islam, including the mass abduction of Christian children,

• the imposition of dhimmitude with its heavy taxes and daily humiliations of various kinds,

• waves of deportations, and

• finally, outright genocide—the systematic extermination of the remaining Armenians, Assyrians/Arameans, and Greeks in the early 20th century.

This systematic destruction of ancient Christian societies took place in what many historians now describe as “the century of genocide,” shaped by violent secular ideologies—fascism, Nazism, and communism. At their roots lay Kemalism, an extreme ethnonationalism that became, in many ways, the mother ideology of modern genocidal nationalism.

To grasp the sheer scale of this long, often unimaginable, centuries-long process of destruction, it helps to look at just a few numbers. In the 11th century, when the Muslim Turks first entered Asia Minor and secured victory at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), the region was home to roughly 13 million Byzantine Christians. After nearly nine centuries of Ottoman Islamic rule, barely one million were still alive by the early 20th century. And even that last remnant was not permitted to remain in its own millennia-old homeland. In 1922–23, during the final push to create a “Turkey for the Turks,” as envisioned by the Young Turks and later completed by the Kemalists, this remaining population was forcibly expelled to Greece—one of the most brutal population removals in modern history.

In this long process directed against the Eastern Christian population, the Muslim Turks did not act alone. At several key moments they were, paradoxically and unchristianly, assisted—directly or indirectly—by the Western Christian powers. I will mention only three examples.

First, in 1204, the Latin Crusaders—who were supposed to help Byzantium defend itself against the expanding Muslim jihad—inflicted a catastrophic blow instead. Rather than protecting Constantinople, they captured and looted it during the Fourth Crusade, and divided the lands among themselves, fatally weakening the Byzantine Empire. When Constantinople faced the final Ottoman assault in 1453, the West again failed to support it, and the Royal City fell to the Ottoman Turks. For more than four centuries thereafter, the Christian populations of the region lived in subjugation until the Greeks, rising again and again, finally won their independence through the life-and-death Revolution of the 1820s, signaling in the years to come the gradual disintegration of the once mighty Ottoman Empire.

Second, in the 19th century, the great European powers repeatedly intervened to save the Ottoman Empire from collapse—at least five times—whether from implosion or external threats. These interventions prolonged the empire’s life long after it might otherwise have fallen.

Third, in the 20th century, France and Italy, joined by Britain and even the United States and of course USSR, chose to support the creation of a new Turkish nationalist state under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This state was built without its historic Christian communities, which were slaughtered or expelled. Even the 120,000 Greeks legally protected under the 1923 Lausanne agreements have now dwindled to fewer than 1,000—while the Muslim population in Greece, originally 120,000, has grown to around 140,000. In other words: today there are approximately 140,000 Muslims in Greek Thrace and fewer than 1,000 Greeks in Constantinople/Istanbul.

This long and painful history, unsettling as it may be, is a necessary introduction—especially in our age of widespread historical amnesia and the uncritical glorification of certain people and ideologies.

Against this historical backdrop, the Pope’s visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—a Church that has suffered greatly and remains constrained under Kemalist, officially Muslim, Turkish rule—is genuinely welcome. As the traditional leader of the Western Christian world, the Pope carries a special moral and political authority (auctoritas moralis et politica, meaning a recognized power to influence through moral standing rather than force*). His presence can be seen as a fraternal gesture of solidarity towards Orthodox Christians and their supreme spiritual leader residing in Constantinople/Istanbul. However, such a visit should not be unconditional, nor should the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy See accept the political terms set by Ankara. This becomes clear when we consider one scheduled event: during his stop in Ankara, the Pope is expected to lay a wreath at the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—the Turkish nationalist leader and co-perpetrator of genocidal policies, admired in his time by Mussolini, Hitler, and several other fascist figures of the interwar period for successfully cleansing his nationalist “New Turkey.”

As established by extensive historical research, Mustafa Kemal Pasha—likely of mixed Albanian and Turkish heritage and a freemason—completed the genocidal campaigns already begun under Sultan Abdulhamid II and the Young Turks. These earlier regimes had targeted the Eastern Christian populations of the region: Armenians, Assyrians/Arameans, and Greeks. Kemal brought successfully this process to its final stage. Under the banner of the so-called “Turkish War of Independence,” he oversaw the extermination, elimination, and ultimately the expulsion of the last surviving Armenian and Greek Christian communities after World War I. His aim was to fully realize the extreme nationalist slogan “Türkiye Türklerindir”—“Turkey for the Turks”, a motto shared by both the Young Turks and the later Kemalist state. His genocidal methodology included intentional, deliberate and premeditated, organized mass massacres of civilians, genocidal deportations, forced labor, indescribable sexual violence, abduction and Islamization of orphans and women, destruction of Christian communities as well as other genocide and ethnic cleansing measures. During Kemalist rule, Pontic Greeks went through unfathomable sufferings. For what were seen as religious victories against Christian “infidels,” the Turkish National Assembly awarded Mustafa Kemal the Islamic Ottoman title ghazi, meaning “holy warrior” or “champion of jihad.” This was effectively his public “family name” until he adopted the surname Atatürk. Between 1913 and 1923, approximately three million Christians—Armenians, Assyrians/Arameans, and Greeks—were intentionally and premeditatedly systematically killed by the Young Turks and the Kemalists, in one of the gravest genocides of the twentieth century, a source or evil inspiration for so many other genocides, the Nazi-perpetrated Jewish genocide included.

As a result of these events, Christians disappeared from Asia Minor after nearly two thousand years of continuous presence and even more millennia as indigenous peoples of that land. Winston Churchill captured the tragedy succinctly when he wrote that “Turkey became once again the sole master of Asia Minor by burning Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population.”

The ancient apostolic churches of Pontus and Asia—Christian communities dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, the Seven Apostolic Churches of the Revelation Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea and those of the Ecumenical Councils, Nicaea, Ephesus—were completely destroyed. In this way, Turkey finally achieved the total Islamization and Turkification of Asia Minor, more than eight centuries after the decisive Battle of Manzikert, when Turkish forces first entered the region.

Thus, Mustafa Kemal Pasha—celebrated in Turkey as a ghazi, or holy warrior—completed the full population “homogenization” of the former Ottoman Empire. In practice, this meant the Islamization and Turkification of the region and the fulfilment of the slogan “Turkey for the Turks.” His “New Turkey,” built on an extreme form of ethnic nationalism, became a model admired by several authoritarian regimes of the interwar period, including the Nazis, the Soviets, and other fascist or aggressively secular nationalist states, which imitated many of his bloody policies.

So, as the American church historian Arthur Warren Johnson argues, the so-called “Christian powers of the West” — Christian in name more than in action, one might add — played a decisive role in sealing the fate of the ancient Christian Churches of Asia Minor and in enabling the destruction of the Greek people there. By repeatedly supporting Turkey at critical moments, Johnson contends, these Western powers became co-perpetrators in that destruction.

Against that background—and even in an age marked by moral confusion, cultural decline, and widespread historical amnesia—I am certain that people who still possess both historical knowledge and moral integrity will inevitably ask themselves:

Will Robert Francis Prevost—American-born and now Pope Leo XIV—show the historical understanding, moral clarity, and courage expected of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and of a major Christian leader? Will he refuse to lay a wreath at the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), one of the principal architects of the genocide carried out against the indigenous Armenian, Assyrian/Aramean, and Greek Christians of the Ottoman Empire and emerging Turkish state between 1913 and 1923?

The years 1913–1923 mark the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the new Turkish national(ist) state. This decade coincides exactly with the genocide of the indigenous Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire and Anatolia. That genocide was the conditio sine qua non—the essential precondition—for the birth of the new Turkish Muslim state. The Christian populations had to be eliminated: those who were not killed were driven out, clearing the way for the creation of a homogenized, Muslim, Turkish nation-state. It was a state forged in blood, shaped by Kemal and the political movements that came before him.

I hope—and pray—that the Pope will choose to refuse taking this immoral action of laying a wreath. Such a refusal would protect his own moral standing, the dignity of his papacy, and the reputation of the papacy as a whole. It would also serve the broader cause of civilization and humanity setting an example for the generations to come. Even if declining to lay the wreath ultimately leads to the cancellation of the visit, that would be far better than compromising the memory of the Christian genocide—one of the gravest genocides of the twentieth century.

In matters like this, the visit itself is secondary. What matters most is preserving historical truth and refusing to honor those who should be consigned to infamia (public disgrace) and to damnatio memoriae—a Latin term meaning the deliberate condemnation and erasure of a person’s memory because of their crimes.

The Pope could also simply decline to travel to Ankara at all, thereby sidestepping this immoral, though unofficial, “expectation” that he honor a man responsible for mass atrocities, genocide. Mustafa Kemal was not only a dictator and a chief architect of genocide; he also became a model admired by other destructive regimes. Hitler himself called Kemal “his teacher” in extermination, and Kemal’s ideology and methods undeniably helped shape aspects of Nazi thinking.

In other words, it is up to the Pope—recognized around the world as a moral spiritual authority (auctoritas moralis)—to demonstrate the ethical example expected of him. He has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to express clear historical disapproval of Mustafa Kemal’s genocidal legacy against the Eastern Christian peoples: Armenians, Assyrians/Arameans, and Greeks.

Many leaders of that era—driven more by political expediency and economic interests than by moral principles—chose to praise Atatürk as an “enlightened dictator.” They did so despite his extreme nationalist-fascist ideology, his aggressively secularist and anti-Christian policies, his hostility toward the West, and the grave crimes committed during his rule (1919–1938) against numerous ethnic and religious communities, including Christians, Alevis, Kurds, and others.

What is striking, in hindsight, is that many of these same leaders across Europe would soon lead their nations into the catastrophe of the Second World War, with all the destruction that followed.

But will Pope Leo XIV — in 2025 — choose silence? Will he pass over the genocidal legacy of Mustafa Kemal Pasha with indifference? And even more troubling: will he appear to approve that legacy by laying a wreath at the dictator’s tomb and signing the visitor’s book? A wreath and a written message are not neutral gestures; they honor the person and, inevitably, cast a shadow of approval over his deeds — including, in this case, his crimes.

Will the Pope take that path?

Or will he choose the opposite course? By refusing to lay a wreath at Kemal’s tomb — as several courageous leaders have done for moral, historical, or political reasons — Pope Leo XIV would immediately affirm his moral authority (auctoritas moralis) through action rather than words.

If he does otherwise, he risks appearing no different from the worldly authorities who place political convenience above moral truth. And here the biblical warning applies to any leader: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24).

In other words, what truly separates the Pope from the godless and morally bankrupt governments of this world? If he cannot raise a “prophetic voice” when faced with the legacy of one of the twentieth century’s greatest crimes, then when will he speak? And what, then, is the value of his moral authority?

The crimes of the past do not stay in the past. They shape the wounds of the present and the dangers of the future. Let Pope Leo XIV remember that Nicaea—the birthplace of the First Ecumenical Council and a cornerstone of Christian history—is today a city without Christians. It was emptied by the very policies and actions carried out under Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Will the Pope now lend the weight of his office to those policies by laying a wreath at Kemal’s tomb?
Will he, even unintentionally, place the papal seal of approval upon a legacy of extermination and erasure? These are not symbolic gestures. They are moral choices. And history will remember them.

The “biblical spiritual laws” will avenge our hypocrisy, lack of courage, political expediency etc., for as the Apostle says “do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal. 6,7).

Dr. Vasileios Th. Meichanetsidis is a Greek Genocide scholar, co-editor of the “The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks” (2011), and other articles on the genocide of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, 1913-1923. Thanks are due to Eleni Phufas-Jousma for precious editing assistance.