Pope follows papal tradition with Blue Mosque visit

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00:00Today the Pope visited the Blue Mosque on the European side of Istanbul.

00:05It was his first time as Pope to visit a mosque.

00:10Previous popes, Francis and Benedict, went to the same mosque,

00:15but generally popes don't often go to a mosque.

00:19And he took off his shoes and walked around in his white socks.

00:22His escort asked him if he wanted to make a prayer,

00:26and he said no, he just wanted to visit.

00:29Then he went to see Patriarch Bartholomew,

00:33the head of the Orthodox Church, on the other side of the city.

00:38And they signed a joint declaration together

00:43in which they said they fundamentally rejected any use of religion to justify violence.

00:53And then the Pope came here.

00:55He went to a basketball court behind those trees over there.

01:00And he conducted a mass for 4,000 people.

01:04And a theme of his mass was that just as Istanbul has three bridges across the Bosphorus,

01:10so we should build three bridges in our own lives.

01:15A bridge to other branches of the Catholic Church.

01:20A bridge to other Christian churches, the Protestants, the Orthodox Church.

01:27And the third bridge, he said, should be to other religions, Islam and Judaism.

01:33And Jesper, has there been any opposition at all to the Pope's visit to Turkey?

01:38Yes, for the first time today we saw it.

01:48I'd been warned that a nationalistic minority might oppose his visit,

01:53and today they show themselves.

01:56The newspaper Eidenlook ran a front page photograph of the Pope

02:01with a headline saying,

02:03Pope is a CIA official.

02:06And then a group of demonstrators held a protest in Istanbul,

02:12not far from where the Pope was meeting Patriarch Bartholomew,

02:17and they said the Pope represented the face of Western imperialism

02:23that was trying to conquer Turkey.

02:25They said the Pope was waging a modern crusade against Turkey,

02:32and, quote, we will defend Turkey.

02:35One of the placards held up by these demonstrators said,

02:39Pope, take your hands off Turkey.

02:41Now how the Pope can be thought to have his hands on Turkey

02:45when 99.8% of the country is Muslim?

02:49I don't know.

02:50I want to stress that this was the work of the far-right extremists.

02:56The demonstrators were only 40 in a city of 16 million people.

03:01All right, very interesting.

03:03Jasper, thank you for bringing us those updates.

03:05That's our correspondent Jasper Morton for us in Istanbul.

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