ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE
Pope Leo XIV set off for Turkey Thursday for the first overseas trip of his papacy, which includes a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and comes amid acute tensions in the region.
The trip, which includes a second leg to Lebanon, begins in the Turkish capital Ankara, where the first American pope is expected to arrive shortly after midday.
There, he will address authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps before heading to Istanbul in the early evening. Leo’s first steps abroad will be scrutinised by the world’s media, with more than 80 journalists accompanying him on his papal plane.
Since his election in May as the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, the pope has shown himself to be adept at handling the media, talking to reporters weekly.
In a sign of his desire to reach a wide audience, Leo will deliver all his speeches during the trip in English, his native language, rather than the Italian he usually uses.
His first address in Turkey is expected to focus on dialogue with Islam in a country where Christians account for only 0.1 percent of the 86 million inhabitants — most of them Sunni Muslims.
On the doorstep of a conflict-ridden Middle East, the pope who upon his election called for “unarmed and disarming” peace, is expected to address the crises troubling the region.
But between the colonnades of Ankara’s monumental presidential palace, Leo will have to tread delicately if he plans to address the sensitive issue of human rights, a wave of arrests of Erdogan opponents, or the status of Turkey’s Christians, who continue to struggle against inequality and exclusion.
Despite the rise of religious nationalism in Turkey and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia — a church for more than 1,000 years — from a museum into a mosque in 2020, the Vatican seeks to maintain a dialogue with Ankara, which is considered a key player for peace efforts in the region.
