He is looking forward with great anticipation to Monday’s meeting between Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pope Francis. Erdogan’s visit mirrors Pope Francis’s three-day tour to Turkey in November 2014 – his sixth trip abroad. There are only about 100,000 Christians among Turkey’s 80 million people, some 0.2 percent of the population. For Erdogan, the pope’s 2014 visit was a symbol of peace between the Christian and Muslim worlds. But what the first reports of this phone call did not reveal was that it was Erdogan who called the Vatican.

Source: Egypt Independent February 04, 2018 18:56 UTC