Pope Leo Visits Turkey, Lebanon In First Overseas Trip As Pontiff

The Vatican announced on Tuesday that Pope Leo XIV will visit Lebanon and Turkey for a six-day trip beginning in late November.

This is his first trip abroad since becoming the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

In a brief statement on Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the pontiff is expected in Turkey from November 27 to 30, a visit that “will include a pilgrimage to Iznik on the occasion of the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea”.

The American pontiff said in July he hoped to visit Iznik for the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea this year, a milestone in church history.

A subsequent trip to Lebanon will take place from November 30 to December 2, he said, adding that an itinerary would come later.

The choices signal that the American pope means to press his repeated appeals for peace and diplomacy in the Middle East and to convey his concerns about the Christians who live there.

According to the Vatican statement, President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, a Maronite and former army general, had invited Pope Leo to visit when the two met at the Vatican in June. During that meeting, the two men addressed the necessary and pressing need to foster the pacification of the entire Middle East region.

Lebanon is majority Muslim but has 18 officially recognised religious groups — including 12 Christian denominations, the largest percentage of Christians in the Middle East — in a population of around six million, including about two million Syrian refugees.

Since being elected pontiff, Leo has made peace and dialogue a central theme at audiences and in other addresses to the faithful. He has also vowed to actively promote the spirituality and traditions of the Eastern Rite churches, the Catholic communities rooted in the Middle East and Eastern Europe that have struggled to survive during decades of persecution and war.

APF reports that Pope Benedict XVI was the last pope to visit Lebanon; it was Benedict XVI in 2012, while the last papal visit to Turkey was in 2014, when Pope Francis travelled to Ankara and Istanbul and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In August, Leo expressed his closeness to “beloved and suffering Lebanon” on the anniversary of the 2020 port explosion that killed more than 190 people, injured 6,000 and caused billions of dollars in damage.