TURKEY PERSPECTIVE

Daily Sabah covers Rubio's visit with factual but geopolitically loaded tone. The paper reports Rubio 'will travel to Rome and the Vatican this week, in a visit seen as an effort to ease tensions following Trump's criticism of Pope Leo XIV.' The article notes 'newspapers presented the visit by Rubio, a Catholic, as a meeting to thaw relations' — phrasing that underlines the relations were indeed frozen, unprecedented for such a close ally as the Holy See. For Erdogan's Turkey, which maintains its own frictions with Western institutions while displaying a posture as defender of Islamic values, the Trump-Pope feud provides an interesting mirror: if the US president can attack the head of the Catholic Church for his pacifist positions, it relativizes Western criticisms of Turkey's own clashes with religious institutions.