Pope Leo XIV condemned violence in the name of religion on Friday at a landmark event in Turkey with Christian leaders from across the Middle East, urging them during his first overseas trip as leader of the Catholic Church to overcome centuries of heated divisions.
At a celebration of the 1,700th anniversary of a major church council with senior clerics from countries including Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Israel, the pope called it a scandal that the world’s 2.6 billion Christians were not more united.
“Today, the whole of humanity, afflicted by violence and conflict, is crying out for reconciliation,” he said at a ceremony in the Turkish town of Iznik, once known as Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed still used by most Christians today was created.
“We must strongly reject the use of religion for justifying war, violence, or any form of fundamentalism or fanaticism,” said Leo, the first American pope. “The paths to follow are those of fraternal encounter, dialogue and co-operation.”
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Friday’s ceremony, at which the church leaders prayed in English, Greek and Arabic and lit candles near the underwater ruins of a fourth-century basilica, was the main reason for Leo’s four-day visit to predominantly Muslim Turkey.
Leo, a relative unknown on the world stage before becoming pope in May, is being closely watched as he makes his first speeches overseas and interacts for the first time with people outside mainly Catholic Italy.
Christians began dividing into different denominations with the East-West Schism of 1054, when the Orthodox and Catholic communities split from one another. Other divisions roiled Christianity in later centuries, including the Protestant Reformation.
The pontiff told the clerics that if Christians could overcome their differences it would offer “a message of peace and universal fraternity that transcends the boundaries of our communities and nations”.
Also attending the ceremony at Iznik, 140km southeast of Istanbul, was ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, spiritual leader of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians.
[ Pope Leo says global conflicts are putting humanity’s future at riskOpens in new window ]
In his welcoming remarks, Istanbul-based Bartholomew urged Christian leaders not only to remember the past but to “move forward” together.
In an illustration of the divisions the pope lamented, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is closely allied to president Vladimir Putin, did not attend Friday’s celebration. The Moscow Patriarchate severed ties with Bartholomew in 2018 over his recognition of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Arriving in Turkey on Thursday, Leo held talks with president Tayyip Erdoğan and lamented that the world was racked by an unusual number of bloody conflicts.
Turkey has about 33,000 Catholics in a population of 85 million, Vatican statistics show, but it was once home to important early Christian saints such as the apostles Philip, Paul and John.
Leo met some of Turkey’s Catholics on Friday morning at Istanbul’s Holy Spirit Cathedral. He urged them not to seek political influence but to focus on helping migrants in Turkey, home to nearly 4 million foreigners. Some 2.4 million of them are Syrian, while many others are from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
The pope will visit Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on Saturday, his first visit as pontiff to a Muslim place of worship, and will celebrate a Catholic Mass at the city’s Volkswagen Arena.
His visit to Lebanon starts on Sunday. – Reuters
