Pope Francis will visit the Hagia Sophia museum and the Blue Mosque in which his predecessor prayed when he visits Turkey next month.
Francis’ 28-30 November trip follows an invitation issued by the civil authorities, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and the bishops, the Vatican said. The Pope and the Patriarch, who prayed together in Jerusalem in May, will celebrate the 30 November ecumenical feast of St Andrew the Apostle together. The pair will also sign a Joint Declaration aimed at strengthening Catholic-Orthodox relations, as they did when they met in May.
The declaration they signed in Jerusalem said their meeting marked a “new and necessary step” on “the journey towards the unity to which only the Holy Spirit can lead us, that of communion in legitimate diversity.”
The Hagia Sophia, once regarded as the finest church of the Christian Byzantine Empire, was converted into a mosque in the fifteenth century and opened as a museum in 1935.
Francis will visit both Ankara and Istanbul. Some commentators hoped that he may travel to the border with Syria but the Vatican made no mention it.
The Pope will visit the Mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk, the president who established modern Turkey as a secular nation state. Francis will travel to the presidential palace and be received by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the authorities, which will be followed by a meeting with the Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. He will subsequently visit the country’s top cleric, the President of Religious Affairs, Mehmet Görmez, in the Diyanet.
The following day, he will visit the Hagia Sophia, which is now a museum, the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, better known as the Blue Mosque, and the Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, where he will celebrate Mass.
Later, in the patriarchal Church of St. George, there will be an ecumenical prayer service and a private meeting with Bartholomew I.
Francis will be only the third Pope to visit a working mosque. Benedict XVI prayed silently in the Blue Mosque after visiting the Hagia Sophia museum when he visited Turkey in 2006. Pope John Paul II visited the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, a former church that houses the relics of John the Baptist.
Meanwhile human rights campaigners have warned that Christians still face “serious discrimination” in Turkey, despite recent government gestures in the run-up to the papal visit.
“Again and again, Christians are treated as second-class citizens - building permits cannot be obtained and church renovations are not approved,” said the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR).
The report was published after an ISHR delegation visited Orthodox Christians living near the Syrian border in south-eastern Turkey, as well as the region’s historic Mor Gabriel monastery.
One Orthodox archbishop told the delegation, which included a German Bundestag MP, Volkmar Klein, that the teaching of Aramaic was not officially allowed at Turkish schools, which only provided Islamic religious classes, and said he believed local officials aimed to drive Christians out, despite the presence of ancient monasteries as “symbols of persecuted Christianity”.
The spokesman for the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, Protopresbyter Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, confirmed that Christian churches and parishes were still denied land-ownership rights in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country, and Christian clergy were still unable to train within Turkey’s borders.
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