Pope visits famous Blue Mosque ahead of meeting Turkey’s religious leaders

Pope Leo XIV has visited Istanbul’s Blue Mosque at the start of an intense day of meetings and liturgies with Turkey’s religious leaders and a Mass for the country’s tiny Catholic community.

The head of Turkey’s Diyanet religious affairs directorate showed Leo the soaring tiled dome of the mosque and the Arabic inscriptions on its columns, as Leo nodded in understanding.

Speaking to reporters after the visit, the imam of the mosque, Asgin Tunca, said he had told the Pope that the mosque was “Allah’s house”.

“It’s not my house, not your house, (it’s the) house of Allah,” he said. He said he told Leo: “’If you want, you can worship here’, I said. But he said, ‘That’s OK’.”

He added: “He wanted to see the mosque, wanted to feel (the) atmosphere of the mosque, I think. And was very pleased.”

Later, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said: “The Pope experienced his visit to the mosque in silence, in a spirit of contemplation and listening, with deep respect for the place and the faith of those who gather there in prayer.”

Leo was following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, who all made high-profile visits to the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, as it is officially known, in a gesture of respect to Turkey’s Muslim majority. Leo removed his shoes and walked through the carpeted mosque in his white socks.

Past popes have also visited the nearby Hagia Sophia landmark, once one of the most important historic cathedrals in Christianity and a United Nations-designated world heritage site.

But Leo left that visit off his itinerary on his first trip as Pope. In July 2020, Turkey converted Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque, a move that drew widespread international criticism, including from the Vatican.

After the mosque visit, Leo held a private meeting with Turkey’s Christian leaders at the Syriac Orthodox Church of Mor Ephrem. In the afternoon, he was expected to pray with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, at the patriarchal church of Saint George.

He will end the day with a Catholic Mass in Istanbul’s Volkswagen Arena for the country’s Catholic community, who number 33,000 in a country of more than 85 million people, most of whom are Sunni Muslim.

Leo had prayed with these Christian leaders on Friday in Iznik, at the site of the AD 325 Council of Nicaea, the highlight of his trip.

The occasion was to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the council, the unprecedented meeting of bishops that produced the creed, or statement of faith, that is still recited by millions of Christians today.

Standing over the ruins of the site, the men recited the creed. Leo urged them “to overcome the scandal of the divisions that unfortunately still exist and to nurture the desire for unity”.

Such unity, he said, was of particular importance at a time “marked by many tragic signs, in which people are subjected to countless threats to their very dignity”.

The Nicaea gathering took place at a time when the eastern and western churches were still united.

They split in the Great Schism of 1054, a divide precipitated largely by disagreements over the primacy of the pope, and then in other splintering divisions.