Pope visits Cyprus with a focus on migrants
NICOSIA, Cyprus — Pope Francis arrived in Cyprus on Thursday, beginning a five-day trip that would also bring him to Greece and its island of Lesbos, where in 2016 he made a defining visit to refugees living in horrid conditions and brought some back to Rome on his plane.
The trip, the 35th abroad for Francis, who turns 85 this month, reflects his determination to maintain a global focus on the plight of migrants and lands torn by strife.
After being greeted on the tarmac in Cyprus by dignitaries, church officials and children chanting, “Francis, we love
you,” Francis spoke at a ceremony at the presidential palace.
“I have come as a pilgrim to a country geographically small but historically great,” Francis said. “To an island that down the centuries has not isolated peoples but brought them together; to a land whose borders are the sea; to a place that is the eastern gate of Europe and the western gate of the Middle East.”
Francis is the second pope and Thursday he met with local Catholics at the Maronite Cathedral of Our Lady of Grace. Cyprus is an ancient Christian land, and tradition holds that St. Paul arrived here around A.D. 46 to preach the Gospel with Barnabas, a Cypriot and a saint.
Francis, at the cathedral, said he was “visiting this land and journeying as a pilgrim in the footsteps of the great apostle Barnabas” and argued that the diversity of the church “reflects Cyprus’ own place in the European
continent” and the island’s “history of intertwined peoples, a mosaic of encounters.” He added, “Walls do not and should not exist in the Catholic Church.”
While the Cypriot government has complained about having the highest percentage of migrants in the European Union given its tiny population, Francis put the statistic in a more positive light, calling it only the latest layer in a variegated texture centuries in the making.
The pope will spend Saturday reaching out to Orthodox leaders and meeting with officials before traveling Sunday to Lesbos, which Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesperson, said had “become a symbolic place.”