DALLAS — A priest traveled thousands of miles away from his North Texas parish with a special request of Pope Leo XIV.

Father Paolo Capra of St. Augustine Catholic Church in Dallas' Pleasant Grove neighborhood was among a crowd gathered to meet the pontiff Friday in Istanbul, Turkey, as CNN reported. Capra had brought a single brick that is intended to be the first stone laid for the new Dallas church the Pleasant Grove congregation plans to build and told CNN about his plans to ask Pope Leo XIV to bless it.

"This stone – would like to be the first stone of the new church that we want to build in the parish of St. Augustine in Dallas,” Capra explained in an interview with CNN Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb . “We have a little church of 500 people…we want to build a newer, bigge

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