Just as he did in Kazakhstan last month, when Francis attended an interfaith peace conference, the 85-year-old pope is about to participate in the Bahrain Forum for Dialogue: East and West for Human Coexistence.
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In doing so, he will be the first pope to stop in Bahrain. Francis’ historic stopover in Abu Dhabi in 2019 made him the first pope to stop at the Arabian Peninsula.
On the sidelines of the conference, Francis plans to meet again with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni education in Cairo, as well as the council of former Muslims.
In 2019, Francis and al-Tayeb signed a document in Abu Dhabi pledging to Catholic-Muslim cooperation on peace paintings, a pact backed by Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa and Muslim leaders.
According to the itinerary of the trip to Bahrain, Francis would also preside over an ecumenical prayer service in the desert of the city of Awali and continuously attend to the country’s small Catholic community.
Bahrain is home to the first Catholic church in the Gulf, the Church of the Sacred Heart in the capital Manama, as well as the largest, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia, which opened last year in Awali.
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Francis said travel is complicated for him now that he uses a wheelchair and a cane to move around because of the strain on the ligaments in his knee.
But he has continued his travels abroad, which involve relatively little and where he can publicize his “Human Fraternity” initiative, seeing in discussion and opportunities for encounter a way to foster understanding even in times of confrontation and war.