FILE - In this May 25, 2014 file photo, Pope Francis stands with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I as they meet outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem's Old City. When Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, visit migrants on the Greek island of Lesbos this weekend, they'll be doing more than sending a political message about the need to welcome refugees. Christianity's two most important leaders, still officially divided by a thousand-year schism, will be speaking with an increasingly unified voice that has gone beyond the realm of religion to confronting pressing issues such as climate change and humanitarian crises around the globe. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis asked Christians to pray for him before embarking on a one-day visit to the Greek island of Lesbos.

“I will go together with my brothers,” Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Orthodox Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and all of Greece, “to express our closeness and solidarity to the refugees, the citizens of Lesbos and to all the Greek people who have been so generous in welcoming them,” the pope said April 13 at his weekly general audience.

“I ask you to please accompany me with prayers, invoking the light and power of the Holy Spirit and the maternal intercession of the Virgin Mary,” he added.

The pope, along with the two top Orthodox leaders of the region, will visit the island April 16 to highlight the dramatic situation of refugees stranded there.

Lesbos is just a few miles from the coast of Turkey, and for years migrants and refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East have been arriving on this and other nearby islands in an effort to reach Western Europe.

Pope Francis “wants to be there in order to draw attention to the sense of solidarity and responsibility” of all Christians, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, told reporters April 7.

The pope wants to go to Lesbos for the same reasons that drew him to visit the Italian island of Lampedusa: to point to “the reality of refugees and immigrants” and because “he sees an important emergency” unfolding there, he said.