I once visited the Church of Saint Peter in Antakya, the ancient Antioch, a cave where two thousand years ago the apostle who was the first pope came to preach, and which symbolizes the importance in the history of Christianity in the territory that corresponds to current Turkey. With his first papal visit to Turkey, to celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, a city that is today Iznik, Leo the most impressive in Istanbul, with its six minarets built by Sultan Ahmet I. Dialogue with Islam has been a constant for successive popes and the first American pope will be no exception.
And to remove any doubts that any trip by a pope outside Italy is both a religious and political exercise, in what is his first diplomatic pilgrimage, Leo XIV begins by going on November 27th to Ankara, the capital, for a private meeting with President Recep Erdogan, and a meeting with Turkish authorities and members of the diplomatic corps, in which he will make his first speech abroad, and is expected to speak about the need for peace, especially in the Middle East. It was, in fact, the strong position of his predecessor Francis in defending Jerusalem as a holy city for Jews, Muslims and Christians that made it possible to overcome a previous clash with Turkey, due to comments by the Argentine pope himself about the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, which the republic refuses to be considered genocide. Now, already in the pontificate of Leo An Arab country with the highest percentage of Christians (and one of them is always the president, according to the Constitution), small Lebanon has lived in recent decades between suspicions between religious communities and the influence games of other countries in the region, from Syria in the past, to Iran (supporter of Hezbollah) and Israel today.
A country with a Muslim majority, successor to the Ottoman Empire, the modern Republic of Turkey suffered a marked secularization by decision of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk about a century ago, but with Erdogan, Islam regained its presence in the public space. Also under Erdogan, Turkey confirmed its role as a fundamental power, with its diplomacy standing out not only in the Middle East but also in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
It should be noted that Türkiye’s relevance to papal diplomacy did not begin with Erdogan. And we only need to look at papal trips since Paul VI took a plane in the 1960s and inaugurated the era of pilgrimages abroad to be sure of this. Since then, the world seems small from the Vatican, but only half a dozen countries have been visited (if we exclude John Paul I, who had an ephemeral pontificate) by all the popes, and one of them is Turkey. Which is now also the first to be visited by Leo XIV, who fulfills travel plans that already came from Francisco.
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias