Pope calls for an ‘amnesty of the heart’

POPE Francis yesterday urged people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where decades of armed conflicts have killed millions, to grant each other a “great amnesty of the heart” and called on Christians engaged in battle to lay down their arms.

On the first full day of his trip, his third to sub-Saharan Africa as pope, Francis presided at an open air mass for a crowd of more than a million people on the grounds of a secondary airport in the capital Kinshasa.

The Congolese have given the pope one of the most vibrant welcomes of his foreign trips. On his arrival on Tuesday, tens of thousands lined his motorcade route.

At the sprawling site yesterday, his popemobile moved slowly on the runway, with hundreds of thousands of people singing and dancing on either side before he began a mass from a large altar platform.

The country’s people, the pope said in his homily, were suffering from “wounds that ache, continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope never seem to arrive”.

Armed conflict has left 5.7 million people internally displaced and 26 million facing severe hunger, according to the UN. Francis said God wanted the people to find “the courage to grant others a great amnesty of the heart”.

Eastern DRC has been plagued by violence connected to the long and complex fallout from the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. The DRC accuses Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group fighting government troops in the east. Rwanda denies this.

A papal stop in the eastern city of Goma, foreseen when the trip was originally scheduled for last July, was later scrapped because of the flare-up in violence last year. About half of Congo’s population of 90 million are Roman Catholics and in his homily, Francis addressed them as well as other Christians involved in the fighting.

“May it be a good time for all of you in this country who call yourselves Christians but engage in violence. The Lord is telling you: ‘Lay down your arms, embrace mercy’,” the pope said.

Congo has some of the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, gold and other precious metals, but its wealth has stoked conflict between government troops, militias and foreign invaders, as well as driving exploitation and abuses.

The pope also met victims of violence from the eastern part of the DRC yesterday. Today will be his last day in Congo, before he departs for South Sudan.