He also said he hoped the upcoming elections would allow the country to peacefully begin a “new chapter”.
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The diamond-producing nation has been gripped by violence since mainly Muslim rebels known as Seleka overthrew President Francois Bozize in March 2013, an ousting marked by the widespread killing of civilians.
“We are well aware that the recent events and acts of violence which have shaken your country were not grounded in proper religious motives”, Francis said.
There, Pope Francis visited the United Nations headquarters in Nairobi, and after touring a slum on the city’s outskirts, he railed against corruption during a meeting with young people at the capital’s stadium in Kasarani. I have often called this the ecumenism of blood.
“We’re living in an open-air prison”, Ahmadou Tidjane Moussa Naibi, the imam at the mosque Francis is due to visit, said earlier this week. “In effect, our human dignity is expressed by our working for the dignity of our fellow man”.
“Jesus wants to use you to touch the hearts of yet other people: he wants to use your mouths to proclaim his saving word, your arms to embrace the poor whom he loves, your hands to build up communities of authentic missionary disciples”, he said. She is an Bangui, which is the capital of the Central African Republic. “God is stronger than all else”.
Catholic Archbishop Dieudonne Nzapalainga of Bangui, president of the Central African Republic bishops’ conference, Rev. Nicolas Guerekoyame-Gbangou, president of the Evangelical Alliance of the Central African Republic, and Imam Oumar Kobine Layama, president of the Islamic Community of Central African Republic, have been working together to persuade their people to end the vendettas and embrace peace and reconciliation.
After all the uncertainty because of the security situation, the fact that the pope arrived is “a blessing from heaven”, Samba-Panza said.
During the day Pope Francis also visited a refugee camp for people displaced by the sectarian violence and told them: “we are all brothers, regardless of our ethnic or religious group.”…
The country, which was ruled by a succession of military dictators from 1962 to 1993, also has suffered from repeated coups. And so, he said, “Bangui becomes the spiritual capital of prayer for the mercy of the Father”. He opened a “holy door” at the city’s cathedral for a symbolic local start of the Roman Catholic Church’s jubilee year on the theme of mercy.
“On behalf of the ruling class of this country but also in the name of everyone who has played any part in this descent into hell, I confess all the evil that has been done here throughout the course of history and ask for forgiveness from the bottom of my heart”.
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“Let us thank him for his gift of courage, which inspires us to forge bonds of friendship, to dialogue with those who are different than ourselves, to forgive those who have wronged us, and to work to build a more just and fraternal society in which no one is abandoned”, he said. He landed on a runway next to a sprawling camp for the internally displaced and then drove along a risky stretch of road in a Toyota SUV with the windows down, waving to the thousands of joyous people who cheered his convoy.
