Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/181

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rights. Whether rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States. Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks should discover a solution.

Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent thereafter to the Government's schools. The old Rûm community regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction. These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches