JOHANNESBURG — Pope Paul VI became the first modern pope to visit Africa in 1969 and declared the continent a “new homeland” for Jesus Christ. During the quarter century of his papacy, St. John Paul II traveled to 42 African
JOHANNESBURG — Pope Paul VI became the first modern pope to visit Africa in 1969 and declared the continent a “new homeland” for Jesus Christ. During the quarter century of his papacy, St. John Paul II traveled to 42 African countries and earned the nickname “the African.” Pope Benedict XVI said Africa was a continent of hope. Next week, Pope Francis joins his predecessors and visits a region whose growing numbers of Catholics are seen as a bulwark for a church seeking to broaden its appeal in the face of challenges from secularism, competing Christian faiths and violent extremism.
The latter threat, which struck Paris on Nov. 13 with attacks claimed by the Islamic State group and then Mali on Friday, will be a key theme of the pope’s Nov. 25-30 trip to Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic — and a potential security risk for the pope himself.
Each of the three countries have their own narratives of ethnic and sectarian division. In Kenya, the first stop on his tour, Francis is expected to offer a word of encouragement to Christians still reeling from an April attack by the Islamic militant group al-Shabab that killed nearly 150 people at a Kenyan college of mostly Christian students.
He will reach out to “people who are afraid, who have been terrorized, who have been subjected to a lot of security checkpoints and all that,” said Rev. Stephen Okello, a Kenyan Catholic priest who also recalled unrelated ethnic violence following elections in 2007 that killed more than 1,000 people in Kenya.
Indeed, Islamic extremists stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali on Friday and killed at least 20 people. Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group, has waged an insurgency in Nigeria for years. And of more immediate concern to the Vatican, violence between Muslims and Christians in the Central African Republic has raised concerns about security on Francis’ trip itself.
The challenge for the pope, who has described the violence flaring in Paris and elsewhere as part of a piecemeal “third world war,” will be to appeal for people to “rise above their humanity” by resisting the temptation to harden their attitudes, said Jo-Renee Formicola, a papal expert and political science professor at Seton Hall University in the United States.
“How do you reconcile mercy and war?” Formicola said.
