16+ hour, 36+ min ago (995+ words) Pope Leo XIV, center, walking with Muezzin Musa Asg'n Tunca, left, Dr. Emrullah Tuncel, second from left, and Imam of Mosque Sultanahmet Fatih Kaya, visits the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, Saturday, Nov. 29, 2025. Pope Leo XIV visited Istanbul's iconic Blue Mosque on Saturday but didn't stop to pray, as he focused more on bolstering ties with Orthodox patriarchs and promoting courageous steps for Eastern and Western churches to be united. Leo took his shoes off and, in his white socks, toured the 17th-century mosque, looking up at its soaring tiled domes and the Arabic inscriptions on its columns as an imam pointed them out to him. The Vatican had said Leo would observe a "brief moment of silent prayer" in the mosque, but he didn't. An imam of the mosque, Asgin Tunca, said he had invited Leo to pray, since…...

2+ week, 15+ hour ago (867+ words) Pope Francis dons a headdress during a visit with Indigenous peoples at Maskwaci, the former Ermineskin Residential School, Monday, July 25, 2022, in Maskwacis, Alberta. The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts from its vast ethnographic collection to Indigenous peoples from Canada, as part of the Catholic Church's reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas. Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it would return the items to individual Indigenous communities "as soon as possible." A joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church described the pieces as a "gift" and a "concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity." The items were part of the Vatican Museum's ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of…...