Pope Leo plans symbolic debut foreign trips to Turkiye and Lebanon

Pontiff expected to entreaty for bid successful Middle East and code the region’s Muslims and Christians.

Pope Leo XIV has chosen Turkiye and Lebanon arsenic the destinations for his archetypal travel overseas arsenic pontiff.

The Vatican said connected Tuesday that Leo, the archetypal pope who hails from the United States, volition question to Turkiye from November 27-30, followed by Lebanon from November 30-December 2.

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The prime of the 2 Muslim-majority destinations is viewed arsenic symbolic and affluent successful meaning for some Christians and Muslims. Both countries are location to past Christian communities, and the precocious Pope Francis had hoped to sojourn them before his death.

Leo’s sojourn to Turkiye volition travel during the 1,700th day of the Council of Nicaea, the archetypal ecumenical council, held successful what is present the Turkish metropolis of Iznik.

He is expected to conscionable with Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual person of the world’s 260 cardinal Orthodox Christians, for celebrations marking the council, which established cardinal tenets of the Christian faith.

Reverend John Chryssavgis, an advisor to Bartholomew, called the sojourn “profoundly symbolical”.

“Pope Leo is doubtless seeking to explicit and affirm his individuality arsenic a Christian successful a satellite of galore antithetic creeds, wherever each people, careless of religion and race, are called to unrecorded unneurotic successful communal understanding,” Chryssavgis told the Reuters quality agency.

A presumption of Iznik municipality centre, wherever Pope Leo is expected to sojourn for celebrations of the 1,700th day of the First Council of Nicaea, successful Iznik, Turkiye, October 6 [Murad Sezer/Reuters]

In Lebanon, Leo plans to commemorate the 2020 Beirut larboard explosion that killed 200 people. The state of six cardinal radical has the largest ratio of Christians successful the Middle East and is the lone Arab federation with a Christian caput of state, President Joseph Aoun.

The sojourn volition connection Leo – elected to caput The Holy See connected May 8 – a level to entreaty for bid successful the Middle East and code the plight of the region’s Christians.

Like his predecessor, Leo has repeatedly called for bid and dialog successful the region, including calling for a ceasefire successful Gaza to extremity the “terror, demolition and death”.

On Sunday, helium spoke optimistically astir ongoing negotiations to extremity the warfare successful Gaza, saying “significant steps” had been made and urging “all those successful positions of work to perpetrate themselves to this path.”

Travelling overseas has go a large portion of the modern papacy, with popes seeking to conscionable section Catholics, dispersed the faith, and behaviour planetary diplomacy.