An Italian Roman Catholic priest was shot and killed in the courtyard of his church in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon in Turkey.<\/p>\n
A witness said she heard the culprit shout "God is great" as he escaped, a priest said.<\/p>\n
Officers were searching for a teenage boy who witnesses said carried out the attack, according to a police official.<\/p>\n
The police official would not say if the attack might have been linked to the printing in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which has caused anger in Muslim countries. Earlier, hundreds of Turks protested in Istanbul against the printing of the cartoons.<\/p>\n
"Whether the killing is linked to the caricatures will emerge when the culprit has been caught," said Trabzon’s Governor Huseyin Yavuzdemir said. [Source<\/a>]<\/p>\n Well if there is a connection it looks like these protests have taken an even worse turn then the burning down of conciliates and threatening violence. Gerald Augustinus has a post of some funny Photoshopped images<\/a> of the pictures of the protest signs much displayed in the blogosphere. The whole episode just seems so surreal and if somebody had written this storyline in a novel it would have been laughed at. From Danish cartoons, to arson, and now possibly murder.<\/p>\n My own take on the whole thing is closer to Hugh Hewitt’s, The Anchoress<\/a>, and Catholic Outsider<\/a>. The Catholic Outsider specifically said:<\/p>\n I still believe Catholics should not show fear to Islamic fanaticism, but neither enthusiasm on any kind of religion bashing.<\/p>\n It seems to me that some have gone so far into saying that bashing of Moslems is a God given right. Telling the truth with charity is what we are called to do. Prudence is a major component in telling the truth. This does not mean that we have to deny that Islam is a heresy or that both historically and currently that it has mainly relied on the sword and not reason and apologetics to gain followers. Whether the Danish newspaper should have published the editorial cartoons is a matter of prudence, though the government should not be involved in their decision at all. <\/p>\n Now I have to admit that some of the cartoons made me laugh and I think there is an element of truth in some of them, and that bit of truth is probably what irks some more than the fact that they used a caricatured picture of Mohammed. Though I still don’t get the prohibition of his image because of the danger of idolatry.<\/p>\n