MANAMA —
Pope Francis said Sunday he was
praying for “suffering peoples of the Middle East”, at the end of a Bahrain
visit promoting dialogue with Islam.
اضافة اعلان
In a final address before boarding a flight to Rome,
he also urged congregants to pray “for Ukraine, which is suffering so much”,
and for an end to the war.
He told Lebanese congregants he was praying for
“your beloved country, so weary and sorely tried, as well as (for) all peoples
suffering in the Middle East”.
The 85-year-old Argentinian used his four-day visit
to Muslim-majority Bahrain to meet both senior Muslim officials and Catholic
residents of the Gulf, home to a large migrant laborer community.
On Saturday he held an open-air mass for about
30,000 people, many of them moved to tears by the occasion.
Bahrain, which established formal ties with the Holy
See in 2000, has around 80,000 Catholic residents. Most are workers from the
Philippines and other Asian countries.
On Sunday, the final morning of the first ever papal
visit to the island nation, Francis visited Sacred Heart church in Manama and
urged Catholics to be “tireless promoters of dialogue” with other faiths.
“Let us seek to be guardians and builders of unity
... in the multi-religious and multicultural societies in which we find
ourselves,” he said, at the Gulf’s oldest church which opened in 1939.
In his first speech, on Thursday, the pontiff had
spoken of the “right to life” and the “need to guarantee that right always,
including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken”.
Finance Minister Sheikh Salman bin Khalifa
Al-Khalifa told AFP that Bahrain had “robust and wide-ranging human rights and
criminal justice protections”, and that the pope’s comment on the death penalty
had not singled out Bahrain.
This was the pontiff’s second trip to the Gulf
following a 2019 visit to the UAE. He met in Bahrain with Sheikh Ahmed
Al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar Mosque.
He also used the trip to warn that the world was on
a “delicate precipice”, decrying the “opposing blocs” of East and West — a
veiled reference to the standoff over
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“A few potentates are caught up in a resolute
struggle for partisan interests, reviving obsolete rhetoric, redesigning
spheres of influence and opposing blocs,” he said.
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