TURKEY:Pope Benedict XVI flew back to Rome at lunchtime yesterday at the end of a four-day visit to Turkey which was more successful than he could ever have hoped for. Earlier yesterday he had told people there that the Catholic Church "wishes to impose nothing on anyone" but "merely asks to live in freedom".
He spent his last hours in Istanbul with the city's Catholic community and celebrated Mass for them and other Christians at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. It was attended by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of the Orthodox Church and Patriarch Mesrob II of the Armenian Church.
The pope visited Patriarch Mesrob on Thursday night, when he gave thanks for the Christian witness of the Armenian people "often in very tragic circumstances such as those experienced in the last century". He also offered "heartfelt thanks" for "the deeper fraternal relationship that has developed between the Armenian Church and the Catholic Church".
In his homily yesterday he thanked Turkey's civil authorities "for their gracious welcome, and particularly all who made it possible for my visit to take place". Security was as tight as it had been during his visits to other locations since arriving in Istanbul on Wednesday, with about a square mile around the cathedral sealed off by police, some armed.
The pope told the congregation in the cathedral that he longed to see the hope of Christian unity fulfilled. Such hope "impels us as disciples of Christ, advancing with our hesitations and limitations along the path to unity, to act ceaselessly 'for the good of all', putting ecumenism at the forefront of our ecclesial concerns, and not committing our respective churches and communities to decisions which could contradict or harm it," he said.
Before the Mass he released four doves in the courtyard in front of the cathedral as a gesture of peace, and blessed a statue of pope John XXIII there. As archbishop Angelo Roncalli, pope John had been papal nuncio to Turkey from 1935 to 1944, where he was a well-liked figure.
The street where he had his offices in Istanbul has been named Pope Roncalli Street by the city authorities. During the second World War the future pope John used his Istanbul base to help 24,000 Jews escape the Nazis in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, as reported at the Nuremberg trials.
Twice on this trip Pope Benedict referred to and quoted from pope John XXIII's attested love for the Turkish people.
Yesterday's newspapers here were dominated by reports of his visit to the Blue Mosque and his praying there on Thursday. Almost all had front-page photographs of the moment when he and Mufti Mustafa Cagrici stood praying side by side and facing Mecca. Television news programmes broadcast the mosque visit again and again through Thursday evening and night, and again yesterday morning.
"The Istanbul Peace" ran a headline on Milliyet, Turkey's most popular newspaper. "The pope's dreaded visit was to conclude with a wonderful surprise," reported the Aksam daily newspaper on its front page. "In Sultan Ahmet Mosque [ the Blue Mosque's official name] he turned towards Mecca and prayed like Muslims," reported the popular daily Hurriyet.
It was not just people in Turkey who were impressed. "I would compare the pope's visit to the mosque to Pope John Paul's gestures at the Western Wall," Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, vice-dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome, was reported as having said yesterday. He was referring to pope John Paul's praying in the Jewish manner at Jerusalem's Western Wall in 2000.
"Yesterday, Benedict did with the Muslims what John Paul did with the Jews," he said.
The papal visit, which began in the Turkish capital, Ankara, last Tuesday, brought its first surprise that day when, in private talks with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pope Benedict apparently supported Turkey's application to join the EU, contrary to the position he had held before becoming pope. From the beginning of the visit he praised Islam and it was clear he was intent on undoing the damage caused by his Regensburg address last September.
However, throughout he continued to press for greater religious freedom in Turkey, particularly for its small Christian minorities. Ecumenically, the high point was the joint declaration he and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew issued on Thursday, when they committed both churches to seeking "full communion".
Visually, the highlight of his Thursday attendance at a divine liturgy service in the Orthodox cathedral of St George was the appearance afterwards of pope and ecumenical patriarch on a balcony clasping hands above their heads in a mood of celebration.
Meanwhile, protests during the visit were small, haphazard and irrelevant.