Pope Leo “in Asia”

by Cardinal Virgilio Pablo David

It struck me that Pope Leo’s first journey outside Italy was, in fact, his first visit to Asia—to Turkey and Lebanon, lands that geography classifies as Asian even if our mental maps often file them simply under “Middle East.” (Today’s modern-day Turkey was called Asia Minor in ancient maps.) It is as if the new pope chose to begin his pilgrimage not in the historic centers of Western Christendom, but on Asia’s wounded frontier: where Christianity was born, where the Creed of Nicaea was first professed, and where today small Christian communities live precariously amid war, displacement and religious tension.

(Much of what follows, I should say, I owe to the vivid on-the-ground reporting of my friends Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué, who accompanied the Holy Father on these historic visits and allowed the rest of us to “travel” with them through their words.)

1. Nicaea revisited: unity in a land marked by nationalism

Turkey, as Jean-Marc Balhan, S.J., reminds us, is a country where “to be a Turk is to be a Muslim,” and where Christians—locals and foreigners together—make up less than one percent of the population. Yet this tiny flock is remarkably diverse: Armenians, Syriacs, Greek Orthodox, Protestants, Levantine Latins, migrant workers and foreign students, most of them concentrated in Istanbul and Izmir.

Interestingly, Balhan insists that the deepest challenge facing Christians is not Islam but nationalism—the instinct to equate “Turkish” with “Muslim” and to view anything ecumenical or universal with suspicion. The debates around Hagia Sophia and even around calling Bartholomew “Ecumenical Patriarch” are really about that.

Into this sensitive landscape Pope Leo came as a guest of the Ecumenical Patriarch to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. At Iznik, by the submerged ruins of an ancient basilica, he stood side by side with Patriarch Bartholomew and leaders of many other churches, under intense security, to pray where the first great council of the Church once met.

There, Leo returned to the heart of the Nicene faith: Jesus Christ, true God and true man, consubstantial with the Father. He warned of the perennial temptation to reduce Christ to a mere moral hero or “charismatic leader,” echoing the ancient Arian attempt to make him only a mediator between God and humanity. What was at stake in Nicaea, he said, is still at stake today: if God has not truly become one of us, how can we share in God’s own life?

But the Christological dogma became for him a bridge to Christian unity. All the churches, he insisted, even those that do not formally recite the Nicene Creed in their liturgies, are bound together by this confession of faith in the one Lord Jesus Christ. “In the one Christ we are one”—his papal motto—sounded particularly powerful there on Asian soil, so close to the lakeside where the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea gathered in 325 AD.

At the same time, Leo widened the horizon from Christian unity to universal fraternity. He recalled that we profess faith in “one God, the Father,” and that it is incoherent to invoke God as Father while refusing to recognize every human being as brother or sister. From Nicaea he issued a plea that religion never again be used to justify violence or war, but instead become a school of encounter, dialogue and cooperation among peoples.

I find it moving that this first Asian step of his pontificate was not a triumphal visit to a Catholic stronghold but a humble ecumenical pilgrimage, underlined by the call to reject religious nationalism and rediscover the Creed as a source of peace.

2. “Blessed are the peacemakers”: Lebanon as message and warning

From Nicaea the pope crossed to another corner of Asian Christianity, Lebanon—the “land of the cedars,” where Christians and Muslims have long attempted an experiment in shared citizenship. Here his visit carried a different urgency: a fragile ceasefire, daily airstrikes in the south, an economy in ruins and a massive exodus of the young.

He chose as the motto of his visit the words of Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” These words framed his keynote address at the presidential palace, where he spoke to political leaders and representatives of civil society.

Leo proposed three traits of genuine peacemakers that, to my mind, apply not only to Lebanon but to all our conflict-torn societies:

a) Resilience – the capacity to “start anew” again and again. He praised the Lebanese people as a “community of communities” united by the language of hope, a people who refuse to give up even when they have every reason to be discouraged.

b)Reconciliation – peace is more than a precarious balance of armed camps sharing the same roof. It requires healing memories, facing the wounds of past civil war, bringing together victims and perpetrators for truth and justice. Otherwise, he warned, old grievances will simply fuel new cycles of violence.

c)Perseverance – the courage to stay or to return, even when emigration seems the easier path. He spoke directly of Lebanon’s youth and of women as irreplaceable artisans of peace, asking what it would take so that young people no longer feel compelled to abandon their homeland.

Coming from the first American pope, these words resounded as both solidarity and challenge: Lebanon, he seemed to say, can still be a prophetic sign of coexistence for the whole Middle East—but only if its leaders and people dare to become peacemakers rather than passive victims of others’ geopolitical games.

3. Cedars, anchors and a Filipino voice

The following day took Leo into the mountains: first to the tomb of St. Charbel in Annaya, then to the shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon in Harissa. In Annaya he prayed in silence before the saint’s tomb and then preached that there can be no peace without conversion of hearts, asking the hermit-saint to obtain that grace for all Lebanon and “the entire Levant.”

At Harissa he listened attentively to testimonies of priests, religious and laypeople who chose to remain with their communities under bombardment, caring for both Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and refugees. He picked up the image of the anchor from the logo of the trip and, echoing Pope Francis, spoke of faith as an anchor in heaven: if we wish to build peace, he told them, we must “anchor ourselves in heaven” and then love generously, without fear of losing what passes away. From such deep roots—like the roots of Lebanon’s cedars—spring concrete works of solidarity.

One of the voices he heard there was particularly dear to us in Asia: Loren Capobres, a Filipina domestic worker who has lived in Lebanon for 17 years and now serves other migrants through the Jesuit Refugee Service. She shared how, during the 2024 war, migrant workers were turned away from shelters, and how she herself experienced fear, uncertainty and the temptation to flee. Yet in serving fellow migrants displaced by conflict, she discovered a vocation: “small acts of love that change lives,” as she later put it.

Her testimony was less a “question” in the academic sense and more a heartfelt plea: that migrants and their families not be forgotten, and that conflict cease forcing ordinary people—Lebanese and foreigners alike—to run for their lives. In his reflection that followed, Pope Leo took up her story explicitly. He said that the experiences of migrants like Loren must move Christians to oppose war and to build communities where no one who seeks safety feels unwanted or second-class. He appealed to leaders in the Middle East to stop treating displaced families as expendable collateral and instead to protect them and uphold their dignity.

For us in the Philippines, where so many families are held together across oceans by OFW remittances and daily video calls, Loren’s voice standing there before the pope in Harissa felt like the whole Filipino diaspora speaking: asking that “the Church that says ‘welcome home’” be truly a home for migrants, and that peace be measured not only by geopolitical calm but by the safety of domestic helpers, caregivers, and construction workers far from their own shores.

4. “Disarming our hearts”: a final gesture at the port

Perhaps the most searing image of the entire Asian journey came on the last morning, when Pope Leo stood in silence at the site of the 2020 Beirut port explosion—a place still marked by twisted metal, collapsed silos and unresolved grief. He laid a wreath, lit a memorial lamp, and met survivors and families of the victims, some of whom he embraced in tears.

At the great waterfront Mass that followed, he invited Lebanon to “stand up” and become again a “home of justice and fraternity,” a prophetic sign of peace for the whole Levant. But he insisted that the only way to this future is by “disarming our hearts”: casting off the armor of ethnic and political divisions, opening religious communities to encounter and mutual trust, and reawakening the dream of a united Lebanon where wolf and lamb, calf and lion can dwell together in peace, as Isaiah foretold.

His farewell appeal at the airport was blunt: armed struggle brings no benefit; only negotiation, mediation and dialogue can build a future. Once more he quoted John Paul II’s famous line, “Lebanon is more than a country; it is a message,” and he begged the Lebanese not to let that message be silenced by resignation or hatred.

5. Reading the signs for Asia

Seen from our corner of the continent, Pope Leo’s first papal journey to Asia traces a meaningful arc:

• From Nicaea, where the Church first struggled to speak clearly about who Jesus is, to

• Lebanon, where believers struggle to live out what that faith in the God-made-flesh implies for justice, coexistence and peace here and now.

In Turkey he reminded us that our shared Creed is a bond stronger than the walls history has raised between East and West. In Lebanon he showed that beatitudes are not pious slogans but marching orders for political life: “Blessed are the peacemakers” means resilience, reconciliation and costly perseverance, not only for governments but for ordinary families, youth and migrants.

And somewhere in the middle of it all stands a Filipina worker named Loren, carrying in her story both the wounds and the hopes of millions of Asian migrants. The fact that her quiet testimony helped shape the pope’s strongest words against war and for displaced families is itself a small sign of how the peripheries are speaking to the center.

Perhaps that is the deepest message of this first Asian voyage of Pope Leo: that the future of the Church—and of peace—will not be decided only in grand halls or summit meetings, but also in small chapels in Ankara, ruined basilicas in Iznik, mountain shrines in Lebanon, and in the hidden lives of migrants who discover, “in the heart of war,” the peace of Christ and the courage to remain, to love and to serve.