SAKHIR, Bahrain: Pope Francis arrived in Bahrain on Thursday to begin a four-day trip, the pontiff’s moment to the Arabian Peninsula.
The plane carrying the pope arrived in Sakhir, where he will meet King Hamad bin Eisa Al Khalifa at Sakhir Palace.
“The pope moves forward with a sure logic to open new paths to the other realities of the Muslim world,” said Archbishop Paul Hinder, who has worked in the region for nearly two decades and is the Vatican’s apostolic vicar for southern Arabia.
The pain in the pontiff’s knee was so severe on the way to Bahrain that he may not simply walk around the papal plane greeting the journalists accompanying him as he does regularly. The 85-year-old pope has been walking with a cane since he tore a knee ligament. prior to this year and uses a wheelchair.
The pope brought his message of dialogue with the Muslim world to the kingdom, where the government is organizing an interfaith convention on East-West coexistence.
The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair for several months because of a strain on his knee ligaments, said Thursday he was in “a lot” of pain on his way to Bahrain and greeted reporters traveling with him for the first time. sitting than walking down the hall.
Francis has long presented the discussion as a tool for peace and believes a demonstration of interreligious concord is necessary, now given Russia’s war in Ukraine and regional conflicts, such as in Yemen.
On the eve of the massacre, Francis asked for prayers to announce “the cause of fraternity and peace, which our time desperately and urgently needs. “
This stopover is Francis’ moment in a Gulf Arabian country, following his historic 2019 in Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document selling the Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a prominent Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb. Al Tayeb is the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo.
Francis followed with a stopover in Iraq in 2021, where he won through Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, one of the world’s most prominent Shiite clerics.
Francis will meet this week in Bahrain with Al Tayeb, as well as other prominent figures from the interfaith circle expected to attend the conference, which is held last month in Kazakhstan that Francis and Al Tayeb also attended. The Regional Muslim Council of Elders, the non-secular leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church and rabbis from the United States, is expected, according to the Bahrain program.
The testament will also allow Francis to minister to Bahrain’s Catholic community, which numbers about 80,000 more people in a country of about 1. 5 million more. Most are employees from the Philippines and India, though tour organizers expect pilgrims from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries. countries to attend Francis’ main Mass at the National Stadium on Saturday.
Bahrain is home to the first Catholic church in the Gulf, the Parish of the Sacred Heart, which opened in 1939, as well as the largest, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia. The church, with capacity for 2,300 people, opened last year in the desert city of Awali on land donated to the church through the king. In fact, the king introduced Francis to a style of the church on his stopover at the Vatican in 2014 and issued the first invitation to make a stopover at.
Francis will stop at either of the two churches where he made his stopover and will most likely thank the king for the government’s longstanding tolerance for Christians living in the country.
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