– Visit to Blue Mosque –
The pope and Bartholomew have in the last months worked hard for a rapprochement between the eastern and western Churches which have been split since the schism of 1054.
The reconciliation began in 1964 with the famous embrace in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, the first such meeting since the 15th century.
Bartholomew, who commands considerable respect beyond the Orthodox Church, holds an office that dates back to the early days of the Byzantine Empire, over a millennium before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
During a prayer service Saturday, the pope bowed his head and asked Bartholomew to kiss him on his brow, in a remarkable sign of humility towards the patriarch. READ: Pope in Albania to promote inter religious harmony.
In another hugely symbolic moment, the pope during a visit Saturday to Istanbul’s Ottoman Sultan Ahmet mosque – better known abroad as the Blue Mosque – turned towards Mecca and stood in two minutes of reflection next to a top Islamic cleric.
“I prayed for peace, for Turkey, for everyone, for myself. It was a moment of sincere prayer,” the pontiff later said about the gesture.
His trip was marked by crowds far thinner than during previous visits abroad but also by the heaviest security, which extended to positioning snipers on the balconies of mosque minarets.
Turkey’s Christian community is tiny – just 80,000 in a country of some 75 million Muslims -and only a small proportion of these are Catholics.
Francis’s trip was less controversial than the last by a pontiff – the visit by his predecessor Benedict XVI in 2006 was overshadowed by remarks he had previously made deemed to be anti-Islamic.
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