Aboard the papal plane on Thanksgiving Day, Pope Leo XIV kicked off his first international trip — a visit to Turkey — with distinctly American gifts: a baseball bat and pumpkin pie.
“To the Americans here, Happy Thanksgiving!” Leo said as he greeted about 80 journalists aboard the chartered ITA Airways flight to Ankara on Thursday morning. “It’s a wonderful day to celebrate.”
Two American journalists traveling with the pope gave him pumpkin pies. “It’s not Thanksgiving if there’s not enough to share,” Crux correspondent Elise Ann Allen told the pope as she handed him the second pie.
“I’ll definitely share some,” Leo responded. The pope had plenty to share as NBC News correspondent Claudio Lavanga also gave him a pecan pie.
Leo, a longtime Chicago White Sox fan, also received a baseball bat once owned by Nellie Fox, the White Sox legend who played for the team from 1950 to 1963, when Leo, then Robert Prevost, was a small child.
Smiling, the pope joked, “How did it get through security?”
As a collective gift from the Vatican press corps, the pope received a Byzantine-style icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe made by Spanish iconographer Débora Martínez, a missionary in Cyprus.
The icon, presented by Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki, who has logged more than 170 papal trips, was crafted using classical techniques of Eastern iconography. It depicts the Virgin of Guadalupe in Byzantine style, symbolically linking Latin America’s Marian tradition with the iconography of the Christian East.
At the start of the nearly three-hour flight, the pope continued a practice of his predecessor Pope Francis of walking down the aisle to greet each journalist.
Among them was Elias Turk, a journalist from Lebanon who is the Vatican editor for ACI MENA and EWTN News. Turk briefly shared a personal story with the pope, recounting how he lived through part of the 2024 escalation between Hezbollah and Israel and was trapped in Lebanon during the fighting.
“I told him that I lived … a traumatizing experience with my nephews during the war. We had to run and hide inside a house after being in a garden. We heard fighter jets passing in the skies and then powerful explosions,” he explained. The pope listened closely.
Turk, who is godfather to his nephews, asked the pope to bless two rosaries for the children, a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old, so they could pray for peace. He also carried a third rosary for a two-year-old Polish girl who has been repeatedly hospitalized.
In a light moment with another journalist, Pope Leo said he had already completed his daily Wordle game before takeoff, adding that he solved Thursday’s puzzle in three tries.
According to the pope’s brother, Leo plays Wordle every day and his favorite Thanksgiving dish is stuffing.
During his first apostolic trip, taking place Nov. 27–Dec. 2, Leo will visit Turkey and Lebanon. Follow EWTN News Live Updates of Pope Leo’s first Apostolic Trip.
This article was originally published by CNA.
