Vatican City: Pope Leo XIV is embarking on his first foreign trip, a pilgrimage to Turkey and Lebanon that would be delicate under any circumstances but is even more fraught given Mideast tensions and the media glare that will document history’s first American pope on the road.
Leo is fulfilling a trip Pope Francis planned to make, to mark an important anniversary with the Orthodox church in Turkey. In Lebanon, he’ll try to boost a long-suffering Christian community as well as Lebanese of all faiths who are still demanding justice over the 2020 Beirut port blast.
Leo, who spent 12 years as superior of his Augustinian religious order and two decades as a missionary in Peru, says he loves to travel. And in recent weeks, he has shown both diplomatic and linguistic dexterity in answering questions on the fly from reporters.
The trip is being covered closely by US media, with all major US networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox as well as CNN and the BBC — inside Leo’s travelling pool, following his speeches, homilies and prayers at a crucial moment in negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine and maintain a cease-fire in Gaza.
Vatican correspondents plus Lebanese and Turkish media round out the papal press corps of about 80 journalists, with an ample waitlist of journalists who applied to be on the papal plane but were denied a seat because of limited space.