Early Sunday we learned that the Vatican-chartered Airbus 320, which carried Pope Leo
Our flight to Lebanon is over. Hallelujah!
We definitely had cakes in the sky on the flight from Rome. I sat next to a coworker who brought a pecan pie (which smelled divine, no pun intended) and behind two who gifted our Chicago-born Pope with home-baked pumpkin pies. Pope Leo was over the moon! Our Thanksgiving meal was less exciting but appreciated, served with a menu, real silverware and cloth napkins.
POPE LEO
Pope Leo (Mohammed Yassin/Reuters)
Fast forward to Saturday night, after three long, action-packed days, at a 4,000-person mass in Istanbul for the country’s tiny Catholic community (more than a million Christians, mostly Armenians, were wiped out by the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Now most of the country’s 85 million residents are Sunni Muslims. Catholics make up just 0.2% of the population.)
At Mass I sat next to my colleague Elise Harris, the first to get an interview with Pope Leo (he chose a woman, and an American, how cool is that!) and baker of one of those beautiful pumpkin pies. As Pope Leo walked down an aisle next to us in a cloud of incense, he gave us an almost imperceptible nod and blessed us with the sign of the cross. Amazing!
During the homily, the Pope returned to the themes of peace and unity, emphasizing exactly the same on Thursday in the Turkish capital Ankara, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and again on Friday in Istanbul with Jewish religious leaders and later that day in Iznik, when he joined Orthodox patriarchs and ecumenical leaders to commemorate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.
After that meeting and prayer with Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, he signed a joint declaration as a show of Christian unity.
But the Pope also spoke of the need for unity with non-Christians. “We live in a world where religion is too often used to justify wars and atrocities,” he said. “We must value what unites us, tear down the walls of prejudice and mistrust… to become peacemakers.”
POPE LEO
One man who was not invited to meet the pope in Iznik was Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish national who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City in 1981. Agca was released from prison in 2010 after serving his sentence in Italy and Turkey and now lives in Iznik. He never explained his motive for the assassination attempt, but Turkish media quoted him as saying he hoped to meet Leo “for two or three minutes.” Instead, he was escorted out of town.
Sometimes history repeats itself.
It was a big deal when Benedict was seen with his head bowed and lips moving in the Blue Mosque, the country’s main Muslim place of worship. I remember my Reuters colleague shouting excitedly in the press room: “The Pope is praying!” Well, maybe he does, I thought – but how can I explain its importance in a 30-second audio clip?
In 2014, Pope Francis also visited the Blue Mosque and prayed openly there. So it was logical to assume that our new Pope would do the same. The Vatican press office even said in its daily communiqué that he had done so.
But we ‘vaticanisti’ were in the Blue Mosque on Saturday morning, after leaving our shoes at the entrance and putting on a headscarf, and we saw that there were clearly no breaks!
Later, press spokesman Matteo Bruni clarified that the pope had visited the mosque “in silence, in the spirit of reflection and listening, with deep respect for the place and the faith of those gathered here in prayer.”
Indeed, that description of a spirit of “reflection and listening with respect for others” captures the essence of this 70-year-old from the Midwest.
HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
His first words after being chosen to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and bursting onto the world stage six months ago were: “Peace be with you.”
But it is still too early to see how his message of unity and brotherhood of man will resonate in the conflict-ridden Middle East.
