By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Leo will visit eight towns and cities in Turkey and Lebanon later this year, the Vatican said on Monday, his first trip outside Italy as pontiff, and he is expected to make appeals for peace across the region.
Leo, the first U.S. pope, will visit Turkey from November 27 to 30 and then will be in Lebanon from November 30 to December 2.
Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis had planned to visit both countries but was unable to go because of his worsening health. Francis died on April 21 and Leo was elected as the new pope on May 8 by the world’s cardinals.
A central part of the visit to Turkey will be several joint events with Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians, who is based in Istanbul.
They will celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of a major early Church council, which took place in Nicaea, now called Iznik.
“It is profoundly symbolical that Pope Leo … will visit (the patriarch) on his first official journey,” Rev. John Chryssavgis, an adviser to Bartholomew, told Reuters.
Leo will also meet Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in the capital Ankara, visit the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and will celebrate a Catholic Mass at Istanbul’s Volkswagen Arena.
In Lebanon, the pope will meet President Joseph Aoun in Beirut, will host an inter-religious meeting and will lead an outdoor Mass on the Beirut waterfront.
The pope will also pray at the site of the 2020 chemical explosion at the Beirut port that killed 200 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
Travelling abroad has become a major part of the modern papacy, with popes seeking to meet local Catholics, spread the faith, and conduct international diplomacy.
A new pope’s first travels are usually seen as an indication of the issues the pontiff wants to highlight during his reign.
Both Turkey and Lebanon are majority Muslim countries, and Francis put a strong focus on Muslim-Catholic dialogue during a 12-year reign that included 47 trips abroad.
The official motto of Leo’s Lebanon trip is “Blessed are the peacemakers”.
(Reporting by Joshua McElweeEditing by Gareth Jones)
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