Francis began the second day of his visit to the continent with a direct appeal to the warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo to put down their weapons and forgive one another.
The thumping church music, booming choir, and an exuberant crowd of about a million people greeting Pope Francis for an open-air papal Mass on Wednesday in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, felt a world away from the violence ravaging the country’s east, where scores of competing armed groups are pillaging villages, plundering resources and heightening tensions with Rwanda across the border.
But it was not far from the mind of the pope or of the flock that had come to see him.
“There are many, many problems in Goma,” said Edouard Lobanga, 38, referring to the main city in Congo’s embattled east. “Many, many terrorists. They are killing the women, killing the children, killing the girls.”
Pope Francis began his second day in Congo, part of a six-day trip that will also take him to South Sudan, by focusing on that often-overlooked violence, seeking to bring a measure of peace to an overwhelmingly Christian country that has known little of it.
He directly appealed to the warring groups to put down their weapons, forgive one another and let an enormous nation scarred by bloody conflict and plunder begin to heal.
“For all of you in this country who call yourselves Christians but engage in violence,” Francis said, “The Lord is telling you: ‘Lay down your arms, embrace mercy,’” adding that God “knows the wounds of your country, your people, your land. They are wounds that ache, continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope never seem to arrive.”
Francis sought to be that balm and bring, as he put it in Tuesday’s speech, “the closeness, the affection and the consolation of the entire Catholic Church.” He arrived Wednesday morning to an airport field in Kinshasa, riding around in his popemobile and waving to a vast and swaying sea of onlookers, a turnout the pope has not seen in years. Some cheered him on the wings of planes. Long rows of children in white Communion dresses danced. Many wore shirts, hats and brilliant, flowing dresses bearing Francis’ face.
But the intensifying fighting and violence in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri forced the pope to abandon his original plan to visit Goma, far away in a huge country about 80 times the size of Belgium, its former colonizer.
Instead, some of the victims of that violence will come to Francis on Wednesday, in a private meeting at the papal nunciature in Kinshasa.
Francis already set an urgent, angry tone on Tuesday when he called the decades of horrors in Congo a “forgotten genocide” perpetrated by generations of exploiters, plunderers and power-hungry groups who had preyed on the country’s roughly 100 million people, many of them members of his flock