Pope Francis heads to Poland on Wednesday for an worldwide Catholic youth festival with a mission to encourage openness to migrants made tougher by a jihadist murder of a priest in France.
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Nuns dance at the opening ceremony at World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland.
The killing of an 85-year-old priest in a Normandy church on Tuesday added to security fears surrounding Francis’ five-day visit for the World Youth Day celebrations, which were already high due to a string of violent attacks in France and Germany.
The event is also a chance for Poland’s conservative ruling government, whose reforms have faced criticism for the European Union for breaching standards on rule of law, to demonstrate openness to people from around the world.
There were more posters of John Paul in Krakow than of Francis, an Argentine, but thousands of Catholics lined roads leading from the airport, where the pope was expected to land around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT) amid heavy security.
Founded in Rome in 2000, Peter Pan is a volunteer association and was born from the desire of a group of parents with children suffering from cancer who wanted to offer other families concrete support in facing the hard experience of illness.
Poland is deploying over 40,000 security personnel for the visit. According to Father Christopher Jamison, a Benedictine monk from Britain, people all over the world love festivals, and World Youth Day is one of the biggest festivals.
Pope Francis will start his first trip to Poland on Wednesday to preside at an global Catholic youth jamboree, a usually joyous event that has been dampened by the murder of a Catholic priest in France.
The archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, asked participants to pray for “all the victims of recent terror attacks and especially for the priest who was killed today”.
“This has to be the WYD (World Youth Day) of hope”.
“We are keeping space for our friends on the pavement here, we’ve prepared a song for the pope”, said Maurizio Tellini, a young pilgrim from Italy. He said he will be celebrating with the attendees, and for them, the Jubilee of Mercy, through St. John Paul II’s intercession.
The charismatic saint, hailed for his role in toppling Communism, sponsored conservative Catholic movements – a legacy which sits uncomfortably with the Argentine’s attempts to nurture a more flexible, compassionate Church. “And they want to disturb that”. The world has been in a fragmented war for some time. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack.
Francis will find himself even more at odds with the nation’s political leaders, who have shut the doors to refugees from the Middle East and Africa, arguing they need to ensure Poland’s security.
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The pope may also face a bit of a backlash from the Polish Catholic Church, which has not embraced his more liberal views on gays, divorce and immigration.
