While evoking the “terrible laceration” of the island cut in two since the Turkish invasion of 1974, François pleaded for a Europe which welcomes “other cultures”.
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In front of the little Maronite Cathedral Notre-Dame-des-Graces, in Nicosia, some United Nations peacekeeping force soldiers in Cyprus watch over. Pope Francis has just landed in Larnaka and he has planned to make the first stop of his visit of forty-eight hours in the most oriental country of the European Union. But the Church is located on the edge of the line separating the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (RTCN), born from the Turkish military intervention of 1974 and recognized by Turkey alone.
It is welcomed by Cardinal Bechara Boutros Raï, the Patriarch of Antioch of Maronites, and the Archbishop Selim Jean Sfeir. Inside in all their diversity priests, religious and religious as well as the representatives of ecclesial movements present on the island. What better place that this assembly bringing together different branches of Latin and Oriental Catholicism to praise a fraternal church and rich in its “diversity”, endowed with “a lot of spiritual and ecclesial sensitivities, stories of varied origins, of rites and different traditions “?
While addressing the Catholic Church, Pope Francis also expressed for Europe in this religious crucible. In this island “which is a tangle of peoples, a mosaic of meetings,” he said, the Church “welcomes, integrates and accompanies” and “presents himself as a multicolored people”, with “people coming from Another world, another culture “. “There is no and there must not be a wall in the Catholic Church,” he asked forcibly.
“Exceed Divisions”
There is in, this church, for the Jesuit pontiff, a teaching to be learned for the European countries: “You are immersed in the Mediterranean, a sea of different stories, a sea that has rocked so many civilizations , a sea from which still land today people, peoples and cultures of all parts of the world. By your fraternity, you can remind all, to Europe as a whole, that, to build a dignified future of man, you have to work together, go beyond the divisions (…) We need to welcome us and integrate us, to walk together, to be brothers and sisters of all! “
A little later, before the Political and Diplomatic Representatives of Cyprus, François continued his eulogy of “the chromatic range” of the population of the island. The President of the Republic, Nicos Anastasiades, however, drew his attention to the difficulties in which the country is exposed because of the arrival of many refugees but also “important flows of illegal immigrants through the occupied territories”, C ‘ is the northern part of the island. He thanked the Pope of his intention to transfer fifty migrants to Rome: “Your symbolic initiative is, above all, a strong message on the need for an indispensable revision of the European Union’s immigration policy. There is a more equitable sharing of problem management. “
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