5 Papal Visits That Made History

Pope Urban II, who was born in northern France, was one of the first popes to travel extensively in France during his papacy. Urban II followed in the footsteps of Pope Gregory VII, a reformer who tried to root out clerical abuses after a “low point of the papacy” in the 10th century, says Matthew Sewell of “The Popecast,” a papal history podcast.

In 1095, Urban II left Rome and crossed the Alps to attend the Council of Clermont in central France. Addressing a large audience of clerics and noblemen, Urban II called on all European Christians to take up arms against the Seljuk Empire. There, Muslim Turks controlled the Holy Land and attacked Christians seeking to visit holy sites.

In his historic speech, Urban II insulted the Turks as “despised, degenerate and slave[s] of the demons” and exhorted “men of all ranks, knights and foot-soldiers, rich and poor, to hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of our brethren and to bear timely aid to the worshippers of Christ.”

Between 60,000 and 100,000 people answered Urban’s call, launching a violent campaign that became known the First Crusade.

At the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte viewed the Catholic Church as one of his greatest rivals for consolidating power in France and beyond. In 1801, Napoleon struck a deal with Pope Pius VII that recognized Catholicism as “the religion of the great majority of the French people” but placed the church in France under strict state control.

Then in 1804, Napoleon invited Pius VII to attend the lavish coronation ceremony where he named himself the emperor of France. According to tradition, the pope was supposed to crown the Holy Roman Emperor, but when Pius VII held out the crown, “Napoleon famously took it at the last second and crowned himself and then his wife,” Sewell says. Napoleon later commissioned a large painting of the moment, believing he had humiliated the pope and his bishops.

As Napoleon seized more land and power in Europe, Pius VII refused to condone the emperor’s actions and pushed back against his attempts to further control the church. Frustrated by the pope’s stubbornness, Napoleon invaded the Papal States in 1809. The 66-year-old Pius VII was abducted from his Roman palace and imprisoned in northern Italy then Fontainebleau outside of Paris.

“Pius VII is in prison for five years, and then Napoleon falls [in 1814],” Sewell explains. “Pius VII makes a triumphant return to Rome. He receives this king’s welcome from the Roman people because they’ve been liberated along with him.”

According to Catholic tradition, the apostle Peter was the first pope, and he left the Holy Land for Rome around A.D. 42. Incredibly, no other pope stepped foot in the Holy Land for nearly 2,000 years until Pope Paul VI made his historic visit to Jerusalem on January 4, 1964.

Under Paul VI, the church implemented the historic reforms of the Second Vatican Council (known as Vatican II), which included the end of Latin mass and a greater engagement with the modern world. Although no pope had left Italy for more than 150 years, Paul VI made it his mission to visit six continents during his papacy.

“Modern global papal travel begins with the papacy of Paul VI,” Bellitto says. “He was the first pope to travel by plane. How unprecedented was that? He was the first bishop of Rome to be in the Holy Land since Peter left. Paul VI was called the ‘Pilgrim Pope’ because of this.”

Paul VI was also the first pope to travel to Africa and Asia, where he survived an assassination attempt in the Philippines in 1970.

Decades later, Pope John Paul II returned to Jerusalem in 2000 and prayed at the Western Wall, where he asked forgiveness for the church’s centuries-long persecution of the Jewish people.

Born Karol Józef Wojtyła in Poland in 1920, Pope John Paul II endured a youth marked by suffering and oppression. He lost both his parents and his brother by the time he was 20, and his beloved Poland was occupied first by Nazi Germany in World War II and then by Soviet Russia. Under Communist rule, religious worship and practice were severely restricted in Poland.

“[Wojtyła] had to be trained and ordained for the priesthood in secret in the basement of the archbishop’s house,” Sewell says. “He was surveilled by the Soviets, but he had this joy about him the whole time. He never forgot that Poland had its own proud cultural heritage.”

In 1978, Wojtyła was elected as the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century and first ever from a Slavic country. As Pope John Paul II, he served for more than 26 years and visited 129 countries, far more than any pope before or since. But his most significant trip was his 1979 visit to Poland, which was still under Soviet rule at the time.

Speaking to a crowd of nearly 300,000 people in Warsaw’s Victory Square, John Paul II reminded the Polish people of the great sacrifices made over their long history and urged them to embrace Christ for the sake of Poland’s future. Days later, he told university students in Krakow: “You are the future of the world, of the nation, of the Church... From the difficult experience that we call ‘Poland’ a better future can be drawn, but only on condition that you are honorable, temperate, believing, free in spirit and strong in your convictions.”

A year after the pope’s inspiring and defiant speech, anti-Communist political activists formed the Solidarity movement in Poland. And less than a decade later, the Polish communist regime collapsed.

Pope Benedict XVI, elected in 2005 after the death of John Paul II, conducted 24 international trips during his papacy, but none more significant and controversial than his visits to Germany and Turkey in 2006.

The trouble started during a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where Benedict XVI addressed the debate between faith and reason. In his lecture, Benedict XVI cited a 14th-century dialogue between a Byzantine Christian emperor and a Persian Muslim, quoting the emperor as saying, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Even though Benedict XVI called the emperor’s remarks “unacceptable” and only quoted them to make a point about violence, reason and faith, news of the anti-Muslim comments spread quickly and sparked protests and riots in Muslim communities around the world. In Somalia, two assailants shot and killed a Catholic nun.

Given the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric after the September 11 attacks, Benedict XVI’s words were especially hurtful and controversial. The pope apologized, but the real test came two months later during a planned visit to Turkey, a majority Muslim country.

In a gesture of healing, Benedict XVI joined the Grand Mufti of Istanbul for a prayer within the walls of the historic Blue Mosque. The reconciliation had a lasting effect on the pope, who during a 2009 visit to Jordan called for an “alliance of civilizations between the West and the Muslim world” rather than a “clash of civilizations.”