At the end of his six -day trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, François celebrated a Sunday mass in front of several thousand people in the capital of the youngest state in the world.
by Sarah Belouezane (Special Envoy in Djouba, Sudan du Sud)
A huge and calm crowd. No dances, no songs. In Djouba, where the pope celebrated in front of 70,000 people on Sunday, February 5, a mass marking the end of his six -day trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, the atmosphere was very different from the overwhelming atmosphere of the celebration which took place in Kinshasa a few days earlier. The Vatican gendarmerie was still monitored, before his arrival, the aisles between the flowerbeds of the John Garang mausoleum – the hero of the long struggle of the southern territories against the domination of the northern regime before the secession, killed in 2005 in an accident helicopter before having seen the birth of the young South Sudanese nation -, where the pope had to make a daddy’s tour. At the microphone, a master of ceremonies also gave instructions: no phone, prohibition to drink and eat and even less to get up or move. Clearly, calm.
And then, suddenly, when the pope passes between the narrow aisles, the crowd comes alive, waving pennants in the colors of the country, singing songs. In this country in the grip of a deadly civil war since 2013, some have seen as a glimmer of hope. François, him, failing to advance the situation, tried to embody this dream.
If he started his stay in South Sudan with a sermon to the country’s political leaders, accusing them of the stack of the situation, the Pope continued his visit to Djouba by reassuring messages to the population.
Sunday, in his homily, he tried to comfort this martyr people, who came to listen to him on a field where mines exploded a few years earlier. “The announcement of Christ is an announcement of hope, he declared. He knows (…) the darkness that oppresses you.” And to add: “For us too all cross turns into resurrection, all sadness In hope, all lament in dance. “
weariness and pride
A light at the end of the tunnel in which they were, in recent days, some to believe despite the stagnation of the peace process between two military forces, each anchored in its ethnic group and directed respectively by the president of the country, Salva Kiir, and one of his vice-presidents, Riek Machar.
Flora, 43, met the day before in this same mausoleum under a setting sun veiled by the many fires that burn in the evening in Djouba, is one of these. “We have lost our brothers, our husbands, for many our children, it is time that it ceases and who better that he could change that?”, Asks this fervent Catholic, who came to attend the ecumenical celebration for peace presided over by the pope , accompanied by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Iain Greenshields, the Church of Scotland, at the head of two confessions represented in the country.
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