Vatican City.- As is his custom, Francis announced another trip to an area that has suffered violence and religious intolerance, this time to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, on June 6.
Looking out of the window of the papal palace in St. Peter’s Square, during a message after the Angelus, the Pope made his second international trip of the year official: “I ask you from now on to pray for me.”
I hope that this trip “will encourage the Catholic faithful, will inspire a ferment of goodness and will contribute to consolidating fraternity and peace, interreligious dialogue and friendship,” Francis said, as quoted by the EFE news agency.
Sarajevo is one of the most devastating examples in recent European history of how the political use of religious differences can unleash a bloody civil war in a young country like Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the republics created after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
As was the case during his trip to Albania last September, Francis will spend only a few hours in Sarajevo and the focus of his message will be tolerance and religious coexistence, one of the pillars on which Bosnia-Herzegovina was built after the war.
Sarajevo is a predominantly Muslim city with a significant Orthodox and Catholic population.
As in the rest of the country, peace and coexistence were achieved by dividing the territory. In general terms, the nation is divided between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska.
Pope John Paul II visited Bosnia in April 1997, two years after the war, and returned in June 2003, when he blessed the layman Ivan Merz.
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2024-08-09 05:52:45
