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EPHESUS - Pope Benedict turned parish priest on the second day of his controversial visit to Turkey, celebrating Mass before 250 people beside the house where the Virgin Mary is reputed to have spent her last years.
He also honoured the name of an Italian Catholic priest shot dead in February by a Turkish teenager, apparently in an act of revenge during the row over "blasphemous" Danish cartoons.
"Let us sing joyfully, even when we are tested by difficulties and dangers as we have learned from the fine witness given by the Rev Andrea Santoro," the Pope told the tiny congregation, one of the smallest in memory for a papal mass.
Santoro was shot while praying in his church in Trabzon, a former Greek enclave on Turkey's Black Sea coast. His murderer, 16-year-old Oguzhan Aydin, was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
The sense of a church embattled and besieged was strongly present during the ceremony. On Wednesday the Pope was a head of state and the head of a world religion, chauffeured from one stiff state engagement in Ankara, the Turkish capital, to another. Yesterday he celebrated mass before parishioners who crowded in among the olive trees next to "Mary's House".
Benedict did not say whether Mary actually did move here from Jerusalem sometime after her son Jesus was crucified in about the year 30 AD. Instead, he simply called Ephesus - the ancient Greek name for the area - "a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy" and focused on theological questions rather than the scant historical facts.
This was extraordinary. The Pope never appears before a crowd less than thousands, often tens of thousands strong. For most pilgrims he is never more than a distant white shape, framed in a Vatican window. But here at the Mary House in Ephesus he was practically within arm's reach.
The worshippers were carefully selected, it was claimed, a privileged slice of Catholic life on Turkey's Aegean coast, whose Christian history goes right back to the Apostles.
Certainly some in the gathering were Turkish Catholics, because Turkish responses were clearly called and psalms and chants in Turkish vigorously sung. But dozens in the small crowd were journalists, many more were plainclothes Turkish security. There were American servicemen and their chaplain from a nearby air force base, retired English and Irish expatriates from nearby towns, a French couple with roots in Izmir going back four generations. Some of the foreigners were Catholics, but quite a few were Protestant.
The tiny throng gave a vivid snapshot of how reduced the Christian community has become in the area where it enjoyed its first important spurt of growth nearly two millenniums ago. In this nation of 70 million, the overwhelming majority is Muslim. There are fewer than 90,000 Christians and only 20,000 of them are Catholic.
Turkey's sunny South Agean coast is beginning to rival southern Spain as a place for British and other western Europeans to retire to, exchanging northern rain and cold for year-round sunshine and cheap property prices.
At least a dozen members of the congregation at the Mass were recent settlers and most said they very happy about the move.
Jane Moulding, originally from Scarborough, who lives in the resort town of Kusadasi with her husband David, said: "We live alongside Muslims and they treat us very well."
Though a beautiful pilgrimage site, the restored house where according to the legend Christ's mother spent her last years, barely qualifies as a church. A small, squat, solid stone house, it has no regular services, though Masses are held on special occasions and weddings are not uncommon.
The persecution of Christians began in Jerusalem soon after Christ's death, prompting the move of the Apostles to Asia Minor.
John the Evangelist, according to the story, moved to the then-prosperous city of Ephesus with Christ's mother, where she spent the rest of her time on Earth.
The site of the house was identified in a vision by a nun called Anna Kathernina Emmerich in 1812, but it has only become a popular pilgrimage site since the construction of a road up the mountain in 1950.
Two of Benedict's predecessors, Paul VI and John Paul II, have also come this way.
But the Ephesian cult of Mary goes back much further: the pagan city worshipped the goddess Artemis as the mother of all living beings on Earth.
When the city began to lose its prosperity as the harbour silted up in the third century, the citizens were quick to grasp the commercial potential as well as the spiritual resonance of being a pilgrimage site in the new Christian Roman empire.
A pilgrimage site it remains today - even though the Christians are practically all gone.
Holy city
During the Roman Republic, Ephesus was the capital of proconsular Asia, which covered the western part of Asia Minor. It was called Asia's "first and greatest metropolis".
In Greek and Roman times, Ephesus was the centre of worship of Diana (or Artemis), goddess of hunting. Its Temple of Artemis was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
By the end of the first century AD, Ephesus had become an important centre for early Christianity. The Apostle Paul spent his longest missionary tour in Ephesus. St John the Evangelist was said to have lived and died in Ephesus. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian built a great basilica over John's tomb, remains of which can be seen today.
According to a later legend, the Virgin Mary joined the Apostle John in Ephesus. A house about 7 km from Selcuk, just outside Ephesus, is believed to have been her last home. The current structure, known as the House of the Virgin, dates to the 7th century and is believed to be built on the site of her house.
It became an official place of Catholic pilgrimage in 1892.
- INDEPENDENT
