Pope Francis urges end to violence in Congo

Yesterday, Pope Francis addressed the conflicting factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo directly to start the second day of his trip to Africa by pleading with them to lay down their guns and show one another forgiveness.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo's capital of Kinshasa, where Pope Francis celebrated an outdoor Mass yesterday, felt a world away from the violence wracking the country's east, where dozens of rival armed groups are pillaging villages, robbing resources, and escalating tensions with neighboring Rwanda, according to the New York Times.

Francis tried to heal the region's wounds by bringing some of its violent victims to him, but he was forced to cancel his trip to the east because of the uptick in warfare.

“We continue to be shocked to hear of the inhumane violence that you have seen with your eyes and personally experienced,” Francis said after listening to the searing stories of survivors in a private meeting at the papal nunciature in Kinshasa.

“To you, dear inhabitants of the east,” Francis continued, “I want to say: I am close to you. Your tears are my tears; your pain is my pain. To every family that grieves or is displaced by the burning of villages and other war crimes, to the survivors of sexual violence and to every injured child and adult, I say: I am with you.”

Pope Francis concentrated on what he called a "forgotten genocide" in the Congo on his second day there, as part of a six-day tour that would also take him to South Sudan, in an effort to bring some measure of peace to a predominantly Christian nation that has known little of it.

According to the United Nations, the Congo is home to a wealth of resources, including gold and cobalt, that armed groups and even nearby nations like Uganda and Rwanda continue to steal and export.

In a direct plea to the combatants on Wednesday, Francis denounced "the atrocities, the rapes, the destruction and occupation of villages, and the plundering of farms and cattle" and called for an end to the use of force.

According to Francis, the nation's "wounds" are "continually poisoned by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the salve of hope never seem to come," he said, lamenting them to the audience.

When he described the decades of atrocities in the Congo as an overlooked "genocide" committed by generations of exploitation, plunder, and power-hungry groups who had preyed on the country's approximately 100 million people, many of whom were members of his flock, the pope already set an urgent, enraged tone on Tuesday. “Never again violence, never again resentment, never again resignation!” Francis reiterated on Wednesday.