Prayers for the upcoming meeting in Turkey

I ask your prayers as Pope Benedict XVI travels to Turkey to meet with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. No one knows what (if anything) will come from this meeting, but the potential ramifications for the future of (post-) Christian Europe are staggering.

Rod Dreher has an excellent editorial in the Dallas Morning News on the visit. Here's a snippet:

It's never far from the Orthodox mind that the West – particularly the Roman Catholic Church – carries significant fault for the loss of Byzantine Christian lands to the Muslim Ottoman empire. The Crusaders sacked Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known, in 1204, fatally weakening Eastern Christian imperial government, which Muslim forces finally overthrew two centuries later. Orthodox memory of this atrocity – for which Pope John Paul II graciously apologized – is long. Yet the hour is late indeed for the Orthodox to dwell on this history, as a resurgent Islam pushes what is left of Christianity in Muslim lands further to the brink of extinction...

Read it all here.