Pope visits Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on Turkey visit
Pope Leo XIV visited Istanbul’s Blue Mosque at the start of a busy day of meetings and services with Türkiye’s religious leaders and mass for the country’s small Catholic community.
While Leo nodded in understanding, the head of Türkiye’s Presidency of Religious Affairs showed Leo the high tiled dome of the mosque and the Arabic inscriptions on its columns.
The Vatican said Leo would say “a brief moment of silent prayer” there on Saturday, but it was not clear whether he did so.
Mosque imam Aşgın Tunca said that he invited Leo to prayer, but the Pope refused.
Speaking to reporters after the visit, Tunca said, “He wanted to see the mosque, I think he wanted to feel the atmosphere of the mosque. And he was very pleased.”
Leo was following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, who made high-profile visits to the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, formally known as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, as a sign of respect for Türkiye’s Muslim majority.
Past popes have also visited nearby Hagia Sophia, once one of Christianity’s most important historic cathedrals and designated a world heritage site by the United Nations.
However, on his first trip as Pope, Leo left this visit out of his itinerary.
In July 2020, Türkiye converted Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque; this move sparked widespread criticism internationally, including from the Vatican.
Following the mosque visit, Leo met privately with Türkiye’s Christian leaders at the Mor Ephrem Syriac Orthodox Church.
In the afternoon, he is expected to pray at the St. George patriarchal church with Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians.
He will end the day with a Catholic mass at the Volkswagen Arena in Istanbul for the Muslim country’s small Catholic community.
Leo had prayed with these Christian leaders on Friday in Nicaea, the site of the Council of Nicaea AD325, the highlight of his trip.
The occasion was supposed to celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the council, an unprecedented meeting of bishops that gave rise to the creed or declaration of faith that is still read by millions of Christians today.
Standing on the ruins of the site, the men read this teaching.
Leo called on them to “overcome the scandal of division, which unfortunately still exists, and to cherish the desire for unity.”
Such unity, he said, was particularly important at a time “marked by many tragic signs in which people are exposed to countless threats to their dignity.”
The Nicene meeting took place at a time when the Eastern and Western churches were still united.
They split in the Great Schism of 1054, a schism largely driven by disagreements over papal primacy, followed by other disintegrating divisions.
But even today, Catholic, Orthodox, and most historic Protestant groups accept the Nicene Creed, making it a point of agreement and the most widely accepted creed in Christendom.
