The True Cross: Sign of Conquest or Sign of Reconciliation? By Dilovan Arami The chairman of the Turkish Press Association pondered the words that lay before her. "I think we could say you are exorcising some demons with this," she said thoughtfully. "This is very important, I think it will speak to everyone." The document in question was a one-page confession being carried by Christian apologists on the Reconciliation Walk, an event marking the 900th anniversary of the Crusades. Turkey is the project's main focus as Christians make their way from Europe to Jerusalem, retracing the steps of the Crusaders. Even though Turkey was the land of the early church, and home to Ephesus, Cappadocia, Galatia, and Antioch, the country is now 99.9% Muslim and very suspicious of Christianity. Organizers of the Reconciliation Walk believe that one of the pillars of such religious hostility in the Middle East is the legacy of the Crusades, a series of campaigns organized by the Church to rescue Jerusalem from Muslim and Jewish domination. Whether by massacring European Jews at the beginning of the campaign, or cannibalizing Syrians towards the end; the Crusaders achieved a reputation for brutality and cruelty. Even in the Crusaders own words, their final conquest of Jerusalem was horrific: "After having put to death in the various neighborhoods of the city all those they came across...they flooded the place with the blood of the infidels. One could not look upon the multitude of corpses without horror, scattered arms and legs heaped on the floor on all sides and streams of blood flooding the surface..." * Although many of the Crusaders sincerely believed they were serving God, there is no doubt that they horribly distorted the image of Christ. This is apparent even in the modern Middle East where films energetically depict the Crusaders as crazed savages who cruelly torture women and children under the banner of the Cross. (In Turkish, the word Crusader literally means, man of the cross.) The Crusades outweigh our verbal communication of the Gospel, says Matthew Hand the project's Middle East troubleshooter. How can we expect the Cross of Christ to be understood, when the Crusaders adopted the cross as the symbol of their conquest in the Middle East? This was the last time that Christians went to the Middle East with a witness to the cross; no wonder Muslims and Jews mistrust us. The Reconciliation Walk team hopes that by going back to these lands now, they will be able to undo some of the damage done to Christ's reputation. If early reactions are any indication, their hopes are not in vain: A Jewish community in Europe receives the message of reconciliation with tears; reporting days later that they were still deeply moved by the experience. A young Turk says that since he was a child, he has always heard the stories of the Crusaders in school and watched movies that portray their brutality. Consequently, he has reacted to westerners with fear saying that he always expected them to hurt him. After hearing the message, he responded by tearfully asking forgiveness from a group of Reconciliation Walk message bearers. A Muslim women says she has always been bitterly anti-Christian. After hearing the message of reconciliation, she describes her astonishment that a Swede, Australian, and two Americans would come all the way to her neighborhood in Turkey to ask forgiveness. She states that something in her heart melted upon hearing the message. More about the Reconciliation Walk

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