HISTORIC VISIT
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Pope Francis used the keynote address of his roughly 40-hour stay in the United Arab Emirates to breach delicate taboos on Monday, specifically mentioning Yemen, where his hosts are engaged in a brutal war, and calling on countries throughout the Gulf region to extend citizenship rights to religious minorities.
The remarks by Pope Francis were seen as exceptionally candid for a pope who as a general rule does not criticize the country that hosts him and avoids drawing undue attention to the issues that its rulers would rather not discuss. Rather, he often weighs in diplomatically before landing in the country, or waits until he crosses the border to the next.
But on Monday, during the first visit by a pope to the Arabian Peninsula — where Islam was born — Pope Francis was blunt in a speech before hundreds of leaders from a broad array of faiths on a day used to underscore the need for humanity to stop committing violence in the name of religion.
“Human fraternity requires of us, as representatives of the world’s religions, the duty to reject every nuance of approval from the word ‘war,’” Pope Francis said at the towering Founder’s Memorial in Abu Dhabi.
“Let us return it to its miserable crudeness,” he added. “Its fateful consequences are before our eyes. I am thinking in particular of Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya.”
Later in the speech, the pope called for “societies where people of different beliefs have the same right of citizenship and where only in the case of violence in any of its forms is that right removed.”
Citizenship rights in the United Arab Emirates are predominantly reserved for native-born Muslims. There are a million Christian migrants in the country, but throughout the larger region they are suffering persecution and bloodshed and are essentially disappearing.
After his speech, Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb, the grand imam of an influential Egyptian mosque, Al Azhar, signed a “Document on Human Fraternity.”
The document, a sort of manifesto of peace for two religions whose adherents have spilled each other’s blood for centuries, called upon “all concerned to stop using religions to incite hatred, violence, extremism and blind fanaticism, and to refrain from using the name of God to justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression.”
The declaration added that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” was willed by God, and, “therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected.”
And critically for a pope who has seen his flock massacred in their churches, and for Muslim and Jewish minorities who have seen their houses of worship desecrated, the document asserts that the “protection of places of worship — synagogues, churches and mosques — is a duty guaranteed by religions, human values, laws and international agreements.”
“Every attempt to attack places of worship or threaten them by violent assaults, bombings or destruction, is a deviation from the teachings of religions,” it added.
The pope’s speech included calls for greater education about other religions and peoples, a condemnation of “the seductions of materialism, hatred and prejudice” and the “fake news” that he suggested spread it.
But most of all, it was a forthright message from a pope whose own church, to the dismay of many of his supporters, still recognizes the difference between a just and unjust war. He called on religious leaders to put aside their sometimes violent differences and take the lead in bringing peace to dangerous times.
The pope, who has advocated for persecuted Christian and Muslim migrants and for the poor of all stripes, whether they hail from the Middle East, Europe or the United States, urged his fellow religious leaders to oppose “the arming of borders, the raising of walls.”