Visiting Middle East, Pope may show ‘who he really is’

The pontiff began a trip to Turkey and Lebanon on Thursday — the first foreign voyage of his papacy, and his biggest test yet.

As Pope Leo XIV embarks on his first foreign voyage as pontiff, the congenial Midwestern-born pope is unlikely to make headlines like his freewheeling predecessor. It was on Pope Francis’s first international trip in 2013 that he asked “Who am I to judge?” about gay priests, setting the tone for his revolutionary papacy.

Yet Leo’s six-day trip to the Middle East may test his mild temperament, challenge his geopolitical mettle, and show how this measured, soft-spoken man manages some of the world’s thorniest diplomatic questions.

In Turkey, where he heads first, Leo is set to meet a president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been accused of undermining the nation’s democratic institutions, and attempt to soothe a millennium-long rift between Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

In Lebanon, Leo will try to rally a community of Catholics, the largest in the Middle East, who are living in a country facing economic collapse and rising emigration amid continuing airstrikes from Israel.

“He might seize the opportunity to say something about his vision of the world and how he sees the role of the Catholic Church and Christians in the world,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin. “So far, he’s been cautious on almost everything, but Turkey and Lebanon are the moments where we could see something more systematic or something more organised.”

Although his foreign policy agenda is still coming into view, the pope has demonstrated that, like Francis, he is a strong advocate for social justice and the world’s most vulnerable people. But he has shown more diplomatic skills than Francis did, analysts say, and that in the long run might make him more effective.

Leo has emerged as a standard-bearer for the environment, the poor and the humane treatment of migrants, to the dismay of some conservatives who had hoped he might back away from Francis’ path.

More pointedly, Leo has surprised some on the right by entering the partisan fray in his home country. He called on U.S. bishops to support immigrants amid an escalating deportation campaign under President Donald Trump, and a month later, the American bishops issued a statement rebuking “indiscriminate mass deportation.”

The pope has also said that people with anti-abortion views should fight to protect not only unborn children but migrants as well. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” Leo told reporters.

Despite courting traditionalists by allowing Catholics to celebrate the Latin Mass inside the main basilica at the Vatican, Leo has not rolled back changes that his predecessor introduced and that conservatives disliked, such as allowing priests to bless same-sex couples.

“I don’t think this is Leo suddenly discovering himself,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “I think it’s him revealing to the rest of us who he really is.”

Leo’s diplomatic style may prevent more conservative criticism from boiling over. He is not prone to speaking or acting impulsively, and he consistently focuses on Gospel teachings, which pleases traditionalists.

“The mission of the pope is not pointing to himself saying ‘I am a very charismatic personality and a very prominent figure in the world,’” said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, a conservative who used to run the church’s office on doctrine before Francis removed him from that job. “I think Pope Leo, like many popes before him and after him, is leading everybody to Jesus Christ.”

Pope Leo has also emphasised unity, not just among different factions within the Catholic Church but beyond it.

He has met with Eastern Orthodox church leaders, including a high-ranking cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church, and hosted a state visit for King Charles III, the titular head of the Church of England, which split from Rome in the 1500s.

During the trip to Turkey and Lebanon, he will meet with leaders of Orthodox Christian churches and Muslim groups.

“I think it takes a whole lot of courage to even want to be intentional about being a bridge builder at a time of dense polarity in the life of the church and the world,” said the Rev. Joachim Ozonze, a priest in Nnewi, Nigeria, and a doctoral candidate in peace studies and theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Leo’s style may make him a calmer manager of the papal bureaucracy. In his first address to the Curia, as the Vatican administration is known, he set a tone of gratitude. “Popes pass, the Curia remains,” he said. Pope Francis was known for his barbed comments toward the Curia, once invoking the remarks of a Belgian archbishop who said that “making reforms in Rome is like cleaning the Sphinx with a toothbrush.”

To demonstrate his gentler approach to management, Leo reinstated a 500-euro bonus for Vatican staff (about $575) who worked before and during the conclave that elected him. Francis had redirected those funds toward charities and other welfare groups.

Vatican officials originally feared that Leo might clean house quickly, with new leadership appointments. Instead, he has proceeded slowly. He only appointed his own successor as head of the influential Vatican office that selects bishops more than four months after becoming pope.

Leo “has taken up his mission very seriously but also very patiently,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Vatican office that oversees human rights and the environment.

There are signs Leo could be a more collaborative leader than his predecessor. While Francis regularly assembled the same small circle of cardinals, Leo so far does not seem to seek counsel from a select group. Instead, he has called a meeting of all the world’s cardinals in Rome in January.

Francis “was very much for participation when it comes to believers, but very autocratic when he made decisions,” said Marco Politi, a veteran reporter on Vatican affairs. Leo, said Politi, is trying “to overcome the polarisation behind him.”

Leo is still taking his time to consider some of the unfinished business left behind by Francis, including suspended discussions about allowing women to be ordained as deacons.

In an interview over the summer with Elise Ann Allen of Crux, a Catholic news service, Leo said that “at the moment” he did not “have an intention of changing the teaching of the church” on the ordination of women.

Advocates for women’s ordination have parsed his language for clues as to whether he might change his intentions at some future moment.

“I am feeling quite positive about this pope, honestly, but I do think he’s quite a conflicted man,” said Miriam Duignan, the executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research in Cambridge, England.

She noted that Leo had chosen a woman as his spiritual director when he was a seminarian and that he had spoken openly about a congregation of nuns in Peru that conducts baptisms and marriages.

But, Duignan said, “his job is to keep unity within the hierarchical leadership in the church today, and that means not upsetting the men in power.”