ISTANBUL (RNS) — Pope Leo XIV is about to the touch down in Istanbul on the finish of November earlier than visiting Lebanon for his first worldwide journey since his papal election in Could. The pontiff will go to eight cities from Nov. 27 to Dec. 2, sitting down with each political and religion leaders and main Lots for Catholic locals and pilgrims.
Although Leo will first meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and numerous spiritual leaders, one of the vital elements of his go to might be joint ceremonies with Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople and one among Japanese Orthodox Christianity’s chief non secular leaders.
The 2 collectively are slated to go to the Turkish metropolis of İznik, as soon as Greek-speaking Nicaea that 1,700 years in the past performed host to the primary ecumenical council. There, early church fathers decided a few of Christianity’s most elementary doctrines, reminiscent of setting the date of Easter, explaining the trinity and clarifying the divinity of Jesus. It was agreed that Jesus was “God from God, mild from mild, true God from true God, begotten not made, of 1 substance with the Father,” as reads the Nicene Creed, which many church buildings maintain to be the basic declaration of Christian religion.
The anniversary of Nicaea isn’t only a historic second. It’s a logo round which ecumenically minded leaders in each Orthodox and Catholic church buildings have continued to work on bridging the centuries-old divisions between the church buildings.
The pope and patriarch standing collectively at Nicaea has been within the works for a while. Luca Refatti, an Istanbul-based Catholic priest, advised RNS the journey was deliberate by Pope Francis however delayed by his illness and canceled by his demise earlier this yr. That it was chosen for Pope Leo’s first apostolic worldwide journey is a sign he’ll observe in Francis’ footsteps in bridging relations with different church buildings, Refatti stated.
“To have a good time this second is vital as a result of it’s reminding us of our unity,” stated Refatti, who careworn that the First Council of Nicaea — which occurred just a few years after Christianity was legalized within the Roman Empire — predates divisions of most fashionable church buildings. “Nicaea is vital as a result of it’s mainly the image, the creed, the place each Christian is united. Now, Orthodox, Catholics, Syriacs, Armenians, all people acknowledges and accepts the creed of Nicaea.”
First Council of Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey), A.D. 325, fresco, c. 1600. (Picture courtesy of Wikimedia/Inventive Commons)
One of many longest-standing disagreements between the Orthodox and Catholic church buildings is the inclusion of a single further phrase — “filioque,” which means the son — within the Latin translation of the creed, and never discovered within the Greek model utilized by the Orthodox church buildings.
Nevertheless, constructing relations with the Vatican isn’t one thing Bartholomew has shied away from since his enthronement in 1991. Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Belgium’s College of Liège, stated Sixties Patriarch Athenagoras served for example for such cooperation.
“Patriarch Bartholomew and loads of the management in Fener (Turkey) nonetheless very a lot maintain up the instance of Patriarch Athenagoras as form of the perfect Patriarch of Constantinople,” Noble stated.
Along with this yr being the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, November might be 60 years because the formalization of the Second Vatican Council, when Pope Paul VI and Athenagoras started the method of Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation.
“After the (Second) Vatican Council, the prospect modified fully,” Refatti stated. “It turned from, let’s convert the heretics, to let’s construct collectively unity.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew speaks throughout the Advancing Human Rights and Social Progress session on the Concordia Annual Summit, in New York, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Picture/Andres Kudacki)
Bartholomew has held that harmonious stance even when it has put him at odds with different leaders within the Orthodox world who’ve held extra theological distance from Rome. “What appears to be fairly on their minds in Istanbul can be the intra-Orthodox significance of this,” Noble stated.
Throughout a current go to to Romania, Bartholomew downplayed the autonomy of extra just lately created patriarchates within the Balkans and elsewhere, a few of whom have retained higher ties with the Moscow patriarchate, which broke communion with Constantinople over its assist for an autocephalous church in Ukraine.
However no matter worldwide and intra-church politics, for communities in Turkey, the interplay between two of Christianity’s most outstanding figures is a welcome signal that displays what’s already occurring in lots of church buildings. Refatti stated in Istanbul, there’s “an enormous density of cooperation amongst current church buildings.”
“We share areas, we share sources, we pray collectively,” he stated. “For most people on the bottom, the individuals of God, they really feel they belong to the identical church. The distinction between our church and the Orthodox world boils right down to the authority of the pope.”
Pope Leo XIV holds the Gospel as he presides over the opening of the pastoral yr of the Diocese of Rome within the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, Sept. 19, 2025. (AP Picture/Alessandra Tarantino)
One image of unity many are hopeful to see — particularly in Istanbul, the place Orthodox and Catholic communities are in shut proximity and embrace combined households — is aligning the date of Easter. Whereas the Greek Orthodox Church adopted the revised Julian calendar round a century in the past, which aligned Christmas with the Gregorian calendar that Western Catholics and Protestants use, they nonetheless use a unique algorithm to calculate the date of Easter, ensuing within the dates being so far as a month aside relying on the yr. This yr, they occurred to align on the identical date.
Along with the ecumenical overtures anticipated for the Turkish leg of the journey, the pope’s Lebanon go to is anticipated to provide welcome consideration to Christian communities going through struggle and persecution within the Muslim-majority nation. The pope will “carry a message of peace and understanding to the guts of a Mediterranean space that has, for a number of years now, been within the midst of disaster,” stated Claudio Monge, a Catholic priest who leads the Dominican Examine Institute Istanbul.
In Lebanon, Christian communities have been impacted by the struggle in Gaza and Hezbollah’s battle with Israel.
“(The go to to Lebanon) is highlighting his concern for a really endangered neighborhood and is a really large deal,” Noble stated, including that going to the nation “appears to have been extra (of Pope Leo’s personal selection), fairly than a continuation of one thing Francis was doing.”
