Pope Francis fails to find common ground in Turkey

(The Christian Science Monitor) The idea was to reach out to Muslims, but Pope Francis got a prickly reception from his hosts during his first trip to Turkey.

In a series of strongly-worded addresses in Ankara and Istanbul, the 77-year-old Pope blamed the “fanaticism” of the Islamic State and other militant groups for persecuting Christians in Syria and Iraq and forcing an exodus of communities that have lived in the Middle East for 2,000 years.

But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who received the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics at his controversial $600 million palace outside Ankara on Friday, took a very different tack.