Two Scenes From Pope Francis' Revolution of Tenderness

On the same trip, the Pope crossed another, more pointedly symbolic boundary. His journey retraced the mythic pilgrimage of his namesake, St. Francis, who travelled to Egypt, in 1219, in a futile attempt to end the Crusades. The saint may have imagined converting the local sultan, but what he mostly sought was a détente between Islam and Christianity. That religious divide persists today, of course, and still carries a Crusader legacy. In Cairo, Pope Francis met with Muslim leaders at Al-Azhar University, which was established more than a hundred years before Oxford and remains the most important religious educational institution in the Muslim world.