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Officially, Pope Francis’s Middle East tour is pastoral, focused on support for Christians in the Holy Land and the Vatican’s historical reconciliation with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

On Sunday, however, he took a boldly political turn into the region’s fraught diplomacy by praying at the controversial Israeli security barrier, explicitly accepting Palestinian statehood and inviting leaders of both sides to an unusual private peace summit next month at the Vatican.

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“My heart beats and is looking to love,” he told reporters on the initial flight on Saturday into Amman, where he praised Jordanians for their generosity in accepting most of the refugees from the civil war in Syria, and dipped his hands in the Jordan River, where the ministry of Jesus began with his baptism by John.

From there, on Sunday he crossed into the lands he deliberately referred to as the “state of Palestine,” where he visited the Deheisheh refugee camp, inverting tradition by not going to Israel first.