Pope Francis begins in Cyprus Thursday a visit focused on immigrants and Christian dialogue

 
INA-Sources
 
Pope Francis will arrive Thursday afternoon at Larnaca Airport in his first leg of a visit that includes Cyprus and Greece, during which he will once again bear the banner of defending immigrants and stressing the importance of dialogue between different Christian denominations.
 
He is the second pope to visit Cyprus, eleven years after Pope Benedict XVI visited the small Mediterranean island with an Orthodox majority and the only country in the European Union divided as a result of a foreign invasion. The visit takes two days.
 
The public mass that the Pope will celebrate at the Municipal Stadium in Nicosia on Friday morning will be the climax of the visit. It is the only event in which all the followers of the Catholic Church of all denominations, numbering about 25,000, between Maronites and Catholics, most of whom are Asian immigrants, will be able to see the Pope and participate in prayer.
 
On Friday evening, the Pope presides over an ecumenical prayer to which a group of immigrants are invited.
 
According to the Cypriot authorities, the Pope may repeat the symbolic gesture he made on the Greek island of Lesbos in 2016, when he took with him to the Vatican three Syrian Muslim families illegally immigrating to Greece, noting that negotiations are underway to accompany him when he leaves the island, a number of immigrants. .
 
In a video message published by the Vatican a few days ago, in preparation for the Pope’s visit to Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis reiterated the description of the Mediterranean, on which the two countries are located, as turning into a “great cemetery”, referring to the thousands of migrants who drowned while trying to escape from conflicts and wars in their countries in The Middle East into a safe haven in Europe.
 
And arrived on the shores of Cyprus in recent years, an increasing number of immigrants.
 
The authorities say that Cyprus, which has a population of one million, today has the largest number of asylum applications submitted by immigrants relative to its population, compared to other European Union countries.
 
Source: AFP