Sandro Magister:

On the feast of saint Andrew, Benedict XVI entered the Blue Mosque in Istanbul with the cross of Jesus clearly visible upon his chest. He paused before the mihrab facing Mecca, and prayed in silence beside the grand mufti, who murmured the opening words of the Qur’an: all this took place with the freedom and clarity marked out by his lecture in Regensburg.

But a no less symbolic gesture took place shortly before this, with the pope’s entrance into the Hagia Sophia, now a museum, previously a mosque, and before that the cathedral church of the patriarch of Constantinople, in the land where early Christianity flourished.

In the Hagia Sophia, Benedict XVI did not immerse himself in prayer; he did not repeat the gesture of Paul VI when he visited there in 1967. Surrounded and hemmed in at every moment, he was able only to admire – in the impressive architecture of the Hagia Sophia, in its Byzantine mosaics, and in its Qur’anic inscriptions – the magnificent and sorrowful image encapsulating the Christian East of yesterday and today. First there was Greek civilization and then early Christianity, then Roman culture and then the Islam that conquered but did not erase what came before it, and finally the little flock surrounded by wolves that keeps the Christian faith alive in today’s Turkey.

It was to this little flock that Benedict XVI brought the comfort of Peter: and also to the Churches that do not recognize his primacy in the form it took on in the second millennium.

Because this was the true aim of the visit. Peter, visiting Andrew. The successor of the chief of the apostles embracing the successor of the other missionary apostle among the Greeks. The “First” and the “Second” Rome in the persons of the pope and of the ecumenical patriarch, divided for centuries of schism but now determined to journey toward a new unity: it is a journey begun in 1964 with the embrace between Paul VI and Athenagoras, followed by the revocations of excommunication and by the documents of Vatican Council II, and most recently revived with the theological dialogues taking place on the theme of “counciliarity and authority” and with the meeting this November 30th between the pope and the patriarch.

Bartholomew I is the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. He has fewer than three thousand faithful with him in Turkey, but he is the royal gate through which Benedict XVI wants to reach Churches of the East as a whole, including the Church of the “Third Rome” that is Moscow.

But there’s more. The apostle Andrew – Benedict XVI recalled – “represents the meeting of primitive Christianity and Greek culture.” And what is this, if not the encounter between the Gospel and the Logos, which was at the heart of the lecture in Regensburg?