Pope Leo XIV arrives in Turkey today at the start of his first trip outside Italy as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. It will also take him to Lebanon and into one of the most diplomatically delicate regions of the world, especially for a Christian religious leader.
Praying for peace
Pope Leo’s trip to Turkey and Lebanon is a legacy from Pope Francis, who had planned to visit both countries but was unable to do so because of his failing health. But it could prove to be revealing both about the character and style of this still-elusive new pope and of how he intends to conduct Vatican diplomacy.
The pope’s origins in Chicago and his career as a priest and a bishop in Peru are the elements of his biography that are most often mined for clues about him. But Vatican insiders suggest that his 12 years in Rome as the head of the Augustinian order could be almost as important.
This experience has given Leo a deep familiarity with the workings of the Vatican bureaucracy and unlike his predecessor, he appears to admire and value it. Perhaps on the advice of the Secretariat of State, which he has praised since becoming pope, he has adopted a more cautious approach in commenting on world affairs.
Much of the pope’s visit to Turkey will focus on the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicaean creed most Christians still use. He will mark the anniversary in an ecumenical service with Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the leading bishop among Orthodox Christians.
Turkey is an overwhelmingly Muslim country with a tiny Christian population and the pope will visit the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and meet president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara. Turkey’s influence has grown dramatically in recent years, not only in the Middle East where it is the most important sponsor of the new Syrian government but increasingly across North Africa too.
But the most politically sensitive stage of Leo’s trip will come when he flies on Sunday to Lebanon, where a third of the population is Christian. It is a country in the grip of an economic crisis with an unstable political settlement and facing military attacks from Israel in the south.
Since the latest war on Gaza began in October 2023, more than 3,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon and more than a million displaced. Pope Leo will certainly call for peace but his speeches and sermons will be watched closely to see how far he goes in condemning Israel, as local bishops have done.
The pope will speak English and French in public throughout, a fact that will make the trip more attractive for international media to cover and he will speak to reporters on the flight back to Rome next week.
Francis often turned these flying press conferences into freewheeling chats that produced some of the biggest headlines of his papacy and it will be intriguing to see how his more reserved successor will handle them.
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