The significance of Pope Leo going airborne to Nicaea

Pope Leo XIV arrived in Ankara on Thursday at the start of a six-day visit to Turkey and Lebanon, his first journey abroad since his election earlier this year.

At first glance, the papal itinerary resembles the familiar arc of modern papal travel: state visits in Ankara, a call for peace, gestures of goodwill toward Muslims, and pastoral stops among the vulnerable. But there is much more going on here.

Stepping off the plane on 27 November, the Pope was greeted by Turkish officials before travelling to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, where he laid a wreath and prayed silently for the country’s peace and prosperity.

At the Turkish Presidential Palace, the Pope held a private meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before addressing diplomats and civic leaders at the National Library, urging Turkey to “build bridges of fraternity” at a moment marked by global tension and regional conflict.

The opening day combined the formalities of a state visit with the early signs of a pastoral and ecumenical mission.

The second day of the visit occurring today, 28 November, will take on a more explicitly pastoral character. Pope Leo is expected to meet priests, religious and lay workers at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul, offering what aides describe as an address focused on encouragement and the resilience of small Catholic communities.

From there he will visit a care home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a long-established refuge for elderly residents of every background. The Pope is likely to highlight the charitable house as an example of quiet Christian witness in a city where Catholics make up only a fraction of the population.

In the afternoon, the focus will shift dramatically from pastoral to historic. A helicopter will carry the Pope to İznik, the lakeside town once known as Nicaea, for a joint ecumenical prayer service with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

The gathering marks the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council, during which the bishops of the early Church articulated the doctrine of Christ’s divinity and produced the creed still professed in every Mass.

The Church’s credibility in a fractured secular world depends on recovering unity: seen in this light, the commemorations at İznik are not an isolated ecumenical gesture, nor merely the Pope’s courteous engagement with the Orthodox world. Rather, they are a test case for whether Catholics and Orthodox can once again address the grand scheme of things as occurred at Nicaea.

This is the unifying concept: Nicaea is not only a memory but a measure. For the first time since 1979, a pope visits Turkey with a deliberately theological centre of gravity, and its name is the First Ecumenical Council.

The anniversary gives reason for the trip, but the deeper cause is the Church’s perennial struggle to hold together clarity of doctrine and charity of encounter. That struggle defined 325 AD; it defines 2025 no less.

The event in İznik will recall the Christian world’s first global crisis of belief, the Arian controversy, which threatened to unravel the Church’s proclamation of Christ’s divinity. Bishops gathered back then not to celebrate diversity but to confess the truth that alone could ground unity. The Nicene Creed became the Church’s charter of communion.

For centuries after 1054, the very idea of celebrating Nicaea together would have seemed impossible. Mutual anathemas and political estrangement hardened into habit; even in the mid-20th century, shared liturgical prayer between popes and patriarchs would have been unthinkable.

The fact that Pope Leo XIV now prays beside Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in the place where the Creed was forged represents not a novelty but a culmination: the fruit of the long thaw culminating in 1965’s lifting of the excommunications, the 2014 Jerusalem meeting, along with the quiet patient work of dialogue commissions that seldom make headlines.

History also offers perspective. When past pontiffs visited Turkey – Paul VI in 1967, John Paul II in 1979, Benedict XVI in 2006 – the emphasis often fell on interreligious relations, modern secularism, or geopolitical tension.

Pope Leo XIV seems intent on reminding both Christians and the secular world that unity is possible only when Christians return to the sources of the Church – to the councils, the creed, the Gospel that judges nations and comforts the poor in the same breath.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV takes part in a service with Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, near the excavations of the ancient Basilica of Saint Neophyto in Iznik, the site of ancient Nicaea, Turkey, 28 November 2025 (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)