Pope meets Ukrainian refugees before setting off to Bahrain

TDT | Manama                  

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

The 39th apostolic journey of Pope Francis yesterday, as the Pope said during his All Saints Day Angelus address, began with a “fruitful opportunity to promote, in the name of God, the cause of fraternity and peace.”

Before leaving for the airport, Pope Francis also found the time to meet three Ukrainian refugee families hosted by Italian families at Casa Santa Marta. One of them was the wife of an Orthodox priest, along with her two children aged 18 and 14, from the Kropyvnytskyi region, 150 km from Mykolaiv. Her husband and son are in Ukraine.

The second family is a 30-year-old mother with two daughters, aged 4 and 7, who fled the partially occupied city of Zaporizhzhia. The third family was a 53-year-old woman with a severely disabled 13-year-old son and a 73-year-old mother from Kyiv.

The refugee families were accompanied by the papal almoner, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, who, in an interview, had said the Pope’s visit and the events in Bahrain in which he will participate are “a message of unity, cohesion, and peace” in a world characterized by tensions, oppositions, and conflicts.

Following the meeting, His Holiness flew out of Rome on an ITA Airways flight. The Papal flight took off at approximately 9:45 AM Rome time and landed in Awali at about 4:45 PM local time (2:45 PM Rome time).

The Holy Father during his trip will ‘have the opportunity to engage with religious representatives, particularly Islamic.’ After the Forum for Dialogue, the Pope will meet with Shiekh Dr Ahmed Mohamed El-Tayeb, the Chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders, and Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque, and hold an audience with the members of the Muslim Council of Elders.

These encounters will be followed by an ecumenical meeting and prayer for peace with members of various Christian denominations, at the Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral in Awali.