Pope Francis begins a trip Tuesday to two fragile African nations often forgotten by the world, where protracted conflicts have left millions of refugees and displaced people fighting hunger.
The January 31-February 5 visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan takes the 86-year-old Pope to places where Catholics make up roughly half the population and where the Church is a key player in health and educational systems, as well as in efforts to build democracy.
The trip was scheduled for last July, but was postponed because Francis was suffering from a bout of chronic knee ailment. He still uses a wheelchair and a cane, but his knee has improved significantly.
Both countries are rich in natural resources — the DRC in minerals and South Sudan in oil — but beset by poverty and conflict.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the second largest country in Africa with a population of about 90 million, is receiving the first visit by a pope since John Paul II traveled there in 1985, when it was known as Zaire.
Francis had planned to visit the eastern city of Goma, but that stop was canceled after renewed fighting between the army and the M23 rebel group in the area where the Italian ambassador, his bodyguard and driver were killed in an ambush in 2021. .
Francis will remain in the capital, Kinshasa, but there he will meet with victims of violence in the east.
“Congo is a moral emergency that cannot be ignored,” the Vatican’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, told Reuters.
According to the UN World Food Program, 26 million people in the DRC face severe hunger.
The country’s Catholic Church, with 45 million members, has a long history of promoting democracy and, as the Pope arrives, is gearing up to monitor elections scheduled for December.
“Our hope for Congo is that this visit reinforces the Church’s commitment to support the electoral process,” said British Ambassador to the Vatican Christ Trott, who spent many years as a diplomat in Africa.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo receives the first visit by a pope since John Paul II traveled there in 1985, when it was still known as Zaire.
Unprecedented joint pilgrimage
The trip takes on an unprecedented nature on Friday, when the Pope leaves Kinshasa for the South Sudanese capital, Juba.
That stretch is being done with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields.
They represent the Christian makeup of the world’s youngest country, which gained independence in 2011 from predominantly Muslim Sudan after decades of conflict and has a population of around 11 million.
“This will be a historic visit,” Welby said. “After centuries of division, the leaders of three different parts of [Christianity] are coming together in an unprecedented way.”
Two years after independence, conflict broke out when forces loyal to President Salva Kiir clashed with those loyal to Vice President Riek Machar, who belongs to a different ethnic group. The bloodshed escalated into a civil war that killed 400,000 people.
A 2018 agreement stopped the worst of the fighting, but parts of the agreement, including the deployment of a reunited national army, have yet to be implemented.
There are 2.2 million internally displaced people in South Sudan and another 2.3 million have fled the country as refugees, according to the United Nations, which has praised the Catholic Church as a “powerful and active force in building peace and reconciliation in regions devastated by conflicts”. .”
In one of the most notable gestures since his papacy began in 2013, Francis knelt to kiss the feet of warring South Sudanese leaders during a Vatican retreat in April 2019, urging them not to return to war. civil war.
Trott, a former ambassador to South Sudan, said he hoped the three clergymen could convince political leaders “to deliver on the promise of the independence movement.”
