The scene outside a Catholic church in Istanbul, Turkey, where a reported armed attack took place on Jan. 28, 2024. / Credit: Rudolf Gehrig/EWTN
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 26, 2025 / 16:15 pm (CNA).
A Christian advocacy group’s report details “legal, institutional, and social hostility” toward Turkish Christians as Pope Leo XIV begins his six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon Thursday.
The report from The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), titled “The Persecution of Christians in Turkey,” explores government interference against clergy and Christian entities, restrictions on foreign Christians who visit the country, and widespread social animosity toward the faithful, which sometimes includes direct violence.
“Communities that were once integral to the cultural, religious, and historical fabric of Anatolia have been reduced to a fragile remnant,” the authors state.
“Their disappearance is not the product of a single event but the cumulative result of restrictive legislation, administrative obstruction, property confiscations, denial of legal personality, and — more recently — arbitrary expulsions of clergy, missionaries, and converts,” they add.
Modern-day Turkey, which was governed by Christians prior to the Ottoman Empire invasions in late Middle Ages, is still home to about 257,000 Christians. In 1915, Christians still accounted for about 20% of the Turkish population, but the number has dwindled over the past century and they now account for less than 0.3% of the population.
Persecution of Christians
The report says hostility toward Christians is kept alive through environmental factors, such as Turkey’s refusal to recognize its past by continuing to deny the genocide of Armenians and other Christians during World War I.
At that time, about 1.5 million Armenians and 500,000 other Christians were forcibly deported or massacred, and Turkey’s criminalization of “insulting the Turkish nation” and “insulting Turkishness” is often enforced to quell speech about the historical events, according to the report.
It notes that politicians and state-run media frequently scapegoat Christians for societal issues and depict them as an external and internal threat, with one example being President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan referring to survivors of the genocide as “terrorists escaped from the sword” and another being the state-run Yeni Akit allegedly editing Wikipedia to smear Christians, Jews, and other groups.
In some cases, this hostility yields violence, including a 2024 terrorist attack on a Catholic church that killed one person, and other acts of violence and vandalism.
The report notes that Turkey signed the Treaty of Lausanne after the Armenian genocide, which granted people who believe some non-majority faiths full legal recognition and property rights.
Yet, a narrow interpretation of the treaty ensures “a national narrative that presents Sunni Islam as the primary marker of Turkish identity,” the report says. The treaty also fails to recognize all Christians, only giving a specific reference to Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews, but not Catholics or Protestants, according to the report.
It states that Sunni Islam is often tied to Turkish identity in public education and the process to be exempt from compulsory Islamic education is burdensome for Christians not covered under the treaty.
No church holds legal personality as a religious institution, which means patriarchates, dioceses, and churches cannot “own property in their own name, initiate legal proceedings, employ staff, open bank accounts, or formally interact with public authorities,” the report states.
The government also interferes with religious leadership, prohibiting non-Turkish citizens from being elected as Ecumenical Patriarch, sitting on the Holy Synod, or participating in patriarchal elections in the Greek Orthodox Church. The government also regulates elections for leadership in the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Turkey shut down the Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary in 1971 and — despite promises to let it reopen — keeps it shut down, according to the report.
The report also says Turkey imposes legal constraints and administrative obstruction on Christian “community foundations,” which operate churches, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions.
This includes blocking board elections and failing to enforce court orders. One of the more egregious violations is imposing “mazbut” trusteeship, which ends Christian institutions’ legal recognition and grants control to the government, which essentially confiscates property, the report said.
“These practices reveal a structural system designed to undermine the autonomy, continuity, and survival of Christian communities in Turkey,” the report states.
According to the report, foreign Protestant pastors are often expelled from seminaries. More broadly, it states that foreign missionaries and converts are often targeted as “national security” threats and frequently expelled from Turkey.
The authors encouraged Turkey to grant full legal recognition to all churches, halt interference in Christian organizations, protect places of worship, end arbitrary expulsions, and return property that has been confiscated.
Read More
![Jonathan Roumie tells Father Mike Schmitz: ‘Everything in my life has prepared me for this role’ #Catholic
Actor Jonathan Roumie, known for his role as Jesus in “The Chosen,” and Father Mike Schmitz, known for the “Bible in a Year” podcast, sit down for an in-depth interview. Credit: Ascension Presents
Dec 29, 2025 / 17:21 pm (CNA).
In a new sit-down interview with Father Mike Schmitz, who is best known for the “Bible in a Year” podcast and YouTube videos on Ascension Presents, actor Jonathan Roumie spoke in depth about his role portraying Jesus in the hit series “The Chosen.”“Everything in my life has prepared me for this role,” Roumie told Schmitz in the 43-minute-long interview, which aired Dec. 28 on the Ascension Presents YouTube channel.Looking back at his childhood, Roumie recalled a couple of moments and experiences that deeply impacted him and his own portrayal of Jesus. He said at 12 years old he reenacted Christ’s passion and crucifixion in his backyard after watching Robert Powell’s portrayal of Jesus in “Jesus of Nazareth.”“I had 2-by-8 planks that I found and I hammered them together and I hammered the nails where the hands would go and I painted the blood and the same thing with the feet,” he recalled. “And then I grabbed like a bush, a piece of a branch of a bush, and made my own crown of thorns and I painted blood on it and everything and I processed around to the side of my garage.”Roumie also opened up about his experience being bullied as a child and how it led him to offer up his past trauma to God as he was reenacting the Crucifixion during filming of Season 6 of “The Chosen,” which focuses on Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.“I was bullied as a kid a lot and I had to kind of look at what Jesus went through as a righteous man and a peaceful man and meek and humble and see just the level of devastation and terrorized bullying that he received to the point of death,” he said. “So for me, I think, and I’ll go back and look at all those experiences I had as a kid, which might have been part of the reason that led me to reenact the Passion, as something that I could relate to and I think all of that prepared me for this role.”He added: “I understand it now a bit more, at least I think, in my own sort of human ignorance and pride… Of course I don’t know exactly what all of this is about but it feels authentic. Like, ‘Well, I went through that as a kid and my compassion increased and my empathy increased and now I’m playing the most compassionate, empathetic human being that was God in the universe for all time.’ So I can lend that experience in his suffering and in his empathy even in wanting to forgive his enemies, which I had to do.”“I was beaten pretty bad. So, I had to offer up all of my past trauma to him as I was recreating it, knowing that that was part of my own personal sacrifice — was my own offering for him on behalf of what he suffered for humanity.”The actor shared that before beginning the filming of Season 6, he asked God in prayer that “if it were his will to allow me a fraction of a fraction of what he went through.”Before traveling to Matera, Italy — the location where the Crucifixion was filmed — Roumie injured his right shoulder after falling while filming a scene. An X-ray and MRI showed that he had separated a bit of his AC joint from the clavicle, causing sharp pain.“It was the right shoulder, so the shoulder that was carrying the beam [of the cross] on and it was extremely painful,” Roumie said. “And that was just one of many things.”Roumie added that while filming the Crucifixion “certain adjustments” also had to be made due to pain being felt by the metal and real nails being used during filming.“He [God] gave me exactly what I asked for — just a glimpse, just a glimpse,” he said. “And I think the thing that I got was that I got to enter into it in a way that I had never entered into it before.”Schmitz asked Roumie how his experience portraying Jesus’ passion and crucifixion has impacted the way he attends or prays at Mass. Roumie shared that in the past year he began to feel “convicted to give more reverence to Christ in the Eucharist.”“I started receiving on my knees and on the tongue, which I hadn’t before,” he said, adding that it was slightly “disorienting at first.”He recalled an experience at Mass where he kneeled to receive the Eucharist but the priest asked him to stand up. He hesitated but rose and continued on with the Mass. Afterward, he asked his spiritual director if that was permissible, to which he responded that a priest “shouldn’t do that but it happens.”After this experience, Roumie shared that he “doubled down on it and now I’m prepared to just wait as long as I need to until somebody concedes because I’m not going anywhere.”Returning to his time portraying Jesus in the series, Schmitz told Roumie that “the show is called ‘The Chosen’ in the sense that it’s also about those who were chosen, but you were chosen and there’s something in that that has changed you. You being chosen to not only portray Jesus, but to be his disciple, an imitator of him, as St. Paul says, and that’s changed you.”“That’s something I’m trying to wrap my head around and identify with,” Roumie responded. “It wasn’t somebody else. He picked me. And I, of course, said yes, because I needed the work initially. I didn’t know what it was going to do to me internally.”Once the final season of “The Chosen” airs, it will have been a span of 10 years that Roumie will have been portraying Jesus. He said that this experience is something that might take “the rest of my life to unpack.”There was an error serializing the imagefile_get_contents(https://iframe.ly/api/iframely/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtLHZ1qYhph0&api_key=): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
“So, I have to give myself a little bit of grace, but it’s something that I think I will always live with. And in fact, I don’t know that I want to let it go because it keeps me connected to him, especially when the show ends.”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/jonathan-roumie-tells-father-mike-schmitz-everything-in-my-life-has-prepared-me-for-this-role-catholic-actor-jonathan-roumie-known-for-his-role-as-jesus-in-the-chosen.png)
