TBILISI: Pope Francis landed in Georgia on Friday for a visit billed as a mission of peace to the volatile Caucasus region that will also take him to Azerbaijan just months after he visited arch-foe Armenia.
The pontiff's plane landed at 1100 GMT in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, a country with one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world.
He was greeted with a welcoming ceremony at the airport, where President Giorgi Margvelashvili and the leader of the Georgian Orthodox church, Patriarch Ilia II, were waiting for him.
The two religious leaders embraced each other warmly on the tarmac as cheering crowds of Catholic faithful chanted "Viva Francesco!" and "Bienvenido Papa!"
The Vatican has said that during the three-day visit Francis will "be bringing a message of peace and reconciliation" to the ex-Soviet region that is beset by festering conflicts.
Pro-Western Georgia fought a brief war against Russia in 2008 and two Moscow-backed regions -- South Ossetia and Abkhazia -- are out of Tbilisi's control.
Francis is due Sunday in Azerbaijan, where he will meet with, among others, President Ilham Aliyev, just days after the authoritarian leader won a referendum on constitutional changes seen as consolidating his grip on power.
While in the energy-rich country, Francis is expected to reiterate the call he made three months ago in Armenia for a peaceful resolution of the long-simmering conflict over the disputed region of Nagorny-Karabakh.
Officially part of Azerbaijan, the territory has been under the control of ethnic Armenian separatists since 1994, when a war between the two countries ended in a ceasefire but no formal peace accord.
Since then, there have been sporadic outbursts of violence, including one in April that left 110 people dead.
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Inter-faith dialogue and reconciliation between different branches of Christianity have been dominant themes of Francis's papacy.
And he will be seeking to strengthen relations with the Georgian Church which, like other Orthodox churches, doesn't recognise papal primacy and has doctrinal differences with the Roman Catholic Church.
The churches' disagreements on a number of theological issues explain why Pope Francis and Patriarch Ilia II will not pray together in public during the pontiff's visit to Georgia.
"The papal visit may bring in a certain thaw in the two Churches' relations, but not a breakthrough," Levan Sutidze, religion columnist at Georgia's Tabula magazine, told AFP.
"Theological differences are substantial and the Georgian Church is known for its isolationist position."
Ilia, 83, has overseen a post-Soviet revival of a church which claims the loyalty of more than 80 percent of Georgia's 4.9 million population.
The church leader is a conservative figure known for some controversial views, including that homosexuality is a disease that should be treated like drug addiction.
Georgia was one of the cradles of early Christianity and one of Jesus's apostles, Andrew, is credited with spreading the faith to the territories that make up modern Georgia.
Occupied by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the country regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now targeting membership in the European Union and NATO -- a process its diplomats hope will be "pushed a step forward" by the papal visit.
Francis himself explained the purpose of his visit in June, shortly after he returned from Armenia.
"I accepted the invitation to visit these two countries for two reasons: to emphasise the ancient Christian roots of these lands in a spirit of dialogue with other religions and cultures and to encourage hopes and the paths of peace," he said.
"History teaches us that peace requires great tenacity and continual steps forward, starting with little ones that become bigger as we each move towards meeting each other."
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