Sawt Falasteen - Pope, Orthodox leader to celebrate early Christian milestone

The American pope began his four-day visit on Thursday in Ankara where he urged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to embrace Turkey's role as a source of "stability and rapprochement between peoples" in a world gripped by conflict.

"This land is inextricably linked to the origins of Christianity, and today it beckons the children of Abraham and all humanity to a fraternity that recognises and appreciates differences," he said, before flying to Istanbul where he will stay until Sunday when he travels on to Lebanon.

The 70-year-old pontiff will spend Friday morning with Catholic leaders before going to Iznik to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, a gathering of bishops who drew up a foundational statement of faith still central to Christianity today.

Turkish police removed Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981 from the western city Thursday, Turkish media reported.

Agca -- who was released from prison in 2010 -- said he had hoped to meet the pope, telling reporters that "I hope we can sit down and talk in Iznik, or in Istanbul, for two or three minutes."

The leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics joined a prayer service early Friday at Istanbul's Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, the police shutting down a main artery of Turkey's largest city to allow his entourage to pass.

While hundreds of pilgrims were packed into the church, dozens more waited excitedly in the courtyard outside in the hope of getting a glimpse of the pontiff, many of whom had got up before dawn to be in the front line.

"It's a blessing for us, it's so important that the first visit of the pope is to our country," beamed a 35-year-old Turkish Catholic called Ali Gunuru.

"The world needs peace, we have serious problems, especially in our area, in our country: the foreigners, refugees... I pray for them and I believe the pope will have the power to help them and that he will do everything," he told AFP.

- Unholy traffic -

Visibly moved by his reception at the church, Leo could be seen smiling and looking much more at ease than on Thursday, encouraging his flock not to be discouraged, saying "the logic of littleness is the Church's true strength".

"The Church in Turkey is a small community, yet fruitful," he said in his address, urging them to give "special attention" to helping migrants and refugees staying in Turkey who number nearly three million, most of them Syrians.

"The significant presence of migrants and refugees in this country presents the Church with the challenge of welcoming and serving some of the most vulnerable," he said.

The Holy See also acknowledges Turkey's efforts in hosting refugees and migrants, whose fate was closely followed both by the late Pope Francis and by Leo who recently criticised their "extremely disrespectful" treatment by the government of US President Donald Trump.

Although Leo's visit has drawn little attention in this Muslim-majority nation of 86 million, whose Christian community numbers only around 100,000. But his impact on Istanbul's notoriously bad traffic did not pass unnoticed.

"It's an important visit for Istanbul, but we are the ones suffering," a 55-year-old woman called Fatmah told AFP, without giving her surname.

"Of course it's normal to take security measures, but no one thinks about the workers."

In the early afternoon, Leo will be flown by helicopter to Iznik where he has been invited by the Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, to join an ecumenical prayer service.

The prayer will take place by the ruins of a fourth-century basilica built on the site where the First Council took place.

"When the world is troubled and divided by conflict and antagonism, our meeting with Pope Leo XIV is especially significant," Patriarch Bartholomew told AFP in an interview.

"It reminds our faithful that we are more powerful and more credible when we are united in our witness and response to the challenges of the contemporary world."

Pope Leo is the fifth pontiff to visit Turkey, after Paul VI in 1967, John Paul II in 1979, Benedict XVI in 2006 and Francis in 2014.

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Z.Ramadan--SF-PST