Benedict's Big Adventure

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The pope visited St. Sophia's Cathedral while he was in Turkey trying to make nice with the Muslims. The Cathedral is an empty museum.

Secular Turks want to join the European Union but the Islamic population is still miffed over a speech last September where "Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor, who said that Islam was violent and irrational."

According to the NY Times that speech was really about  empty churches in the West.

"But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech,
and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science
and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the
secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s
worries."