Catholic Church Africa

Pope John Paul II, arriving Saturday in Tanzania at the start of a 10-day, four-country African tour, lost no time in tackling two of the continent's gravest problems: AIDS and refugees. Within three hours of a tumultuous welcome from hundreds of thousands of people on the Tarmac of Dar es Salaam airport, the 70-year-old pontiff called for a massive international effort to combat AIDS.

Faced with reports that priests have sexually abused many African nuns, the Vatican said Tuesday that it is working with bishops and leaders of religious orders to deal with the issue. "The problem is known and is restricted to a geographically limited area," the Vatican's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said in a statement.

If there was any lingering doubt, it was plain to all Wednesday as Pope John Paul II traipsed through provincial towns in southern Chad that he likes being on the road. Rich nations and poor, north and south, city or town--the most-traveled pontiff in history apparently wants to see them all. He has few rivals for the title of most-traveled world leader of the century, according to Vatican officials who keep track of his travels with the painstaking precision of medieval manuscript illuminators.

On a vast plain of red dust once destined to be an airport, in the smothering heat of a damp gray sub-Saharan haze, Pope John Paul II gathered more than half a million Roman Catholics here Sunday for a milestone in the spread of their faith across Africa.

Pope John Paul II on Sunday urged cooperation and brotherhood between Christianity and Islam, two religions with ancient rivalries in Africa. "Religious differences of themselves do not necessarily disrupt life together," the Pope told leaders of the Muslim and other faiths in this East African nation. John Paul said dialogue between Christians and Muslims "is increasingly important in today's world."

Pope John Paul II will visit Mozambique in September of next year as part of a tour of black southern African nations, the Portuguese news agency Lusa reported Thursday. The agency's correspondent in Maputo, quoting Mozambican church sources, said President Joaquim Chissano had invited the Pope for a visit shortly after Chissano's audience at the Vatican in May. The Pope also plans stops in Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Botswana on the trip.

Chastened by the deprivation and desolation that marked his passage through five of the poorest nations on Earth, Pope John Paul II left sub-Saharan Africa on Thursday with a simple prayer. "I pray that God gives to all the peoples of Africa the strength of hope," he said. Ending an exhausting 8,600-mile, eight-day journey through Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad, John Paul again demanded greater international support for African development efforts.

On a vast plain of red dust once destined to be an airport, in the smothering heat of a damp gray sub-Saharan haze, Pope John Paul II gathered more than half a million Roman Catholics here Sunday for a milestone in the spread of their faith across Africa.

Pope John Paul II returned home after a 10-day tour of southern Africa. The trip took him to Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, with an unexpected stop in South Africa because of bad weather in Lesotho. The Pope's Alitalia Boeing 747 landed in Rome after a 10-hour flight from Mozambique. A helicopter was waiting to take him to his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, but a rain squall forced the Pope to leave the airport in a car.

As a rare rain fell across African islands scourged by drought, Pope John Paul II preached faith, courage and perseverance Friday to a nation without resources whose young people are fleeing abroad. Thousands of brightly dressed people gathered in the drizzle outside this capital for an open-air papal Mass climaxing John Paul's two-day visit to Cape Verde, the first stop on his eight-day trip to five of Africa's poorest lands.

Each Sunday, Africa's Catholics tread paths along rough roads, through mud and dust and heat in their best clothes, to fill the day with exuberant songs of worship. Sometimes, though, they tread more ominous paths. Just a year ago, hundreds of thousands of African Catholics were butchered--mostly by other Roman Catholics--and the walls of their churches remain stained with blood today. Some African Catholics deliver the milk of kindness to the infernal reaches.

Summoned to Rome by Pope John Paul II for a special congress, Roman Catholic bishops from Africa are seeking to match the demands of their faith with the social, political and economic needs of a hungry and often violent continent. For about 300 bishops from the 53 nations of Africa attending a monthlong synod here, "inculturation"--melding Catholicism with African traditions--emerged as an overriding concern. "It is the marriage of faith and life," said the group's interim document.

Pope John Paul II sought common ground with believers in voodoo Thursday, suggesting they would not betray their traditional faith by converting to Christianity. On the second day of his 10th African pilgrimage, the Pope held a dramatic and emotional meeting with priests of the vodun , as the ancestral gods are known in the Fon language. The Catholic church seeks to maintain a dialogue with voodoo followers but frowns on superstitious practices.

Feeling fit six months after major surgery, Pope John Paul II returns to Africa again this week to visit a rapidly growing church, to lend support to fledgling democracy and to appeal for better relations between Christians, Muslims and believers in traditional religions. About one African in seven is now a baptized Catholic, but the church's major role in health and education gives it influence disproportionate to its size.

Pope John Paul II on Sunday urged the international community not to forget the needs of Africa, citing its perennial problems of hunger and poverty and new ones like AIDS. But he said African leaders must also do their part to help their own people. Gambia, the second stop on John Paul's West African tour, is one of the smallest countries in Africa, about twice the size of the state of Delaware. The Vatican counts only 17,000 Roman Catholics in the predominantly Muslim population of 860,000.

Pope John Paul II, speaking on a notorious slave island, prayed Saturday for forgiveness for the "horrible aberration" of slavery that Christian white men committed in their pillage of Africa. "From this African sanctuary of black pain, we implore forgiveness from heaven," the Pope said on an emotional visit to the island from which tens of thousands of slaves were shipped to the New World until the early 19th Century.

Bags packed, 41 speeches ready, his pronunciation of Swahili, Kirundi and Kinyarwanda polished with the help of tutors, Pope John Paul II ends a quiet and sedentary summer here Saturday. On the road again. Like a salesman canvassing a rich new territory, the 70-year-old pontiff is returning for the second time this year to Africa, where the Roman Catholic Church is growing even faster than the continent's mushrooming population.

Feeling fit six months after major surgery, Pope John Paul II returns to Africa again this week to visit a rapidly growing church, to lend support to fledgling democracy and to appeal for better relations between Christians, Muslims and believers in traditional religions. About one African in seven is now a baptized Catholic, but the church's major role in health and education gives it influence disproportionate to its size.

Pope John Paul II urged Africa's Roman Catholics Tuesday to abandon the "unspeakable crime" of witchcraft, a practice that threatens the church's foundations on the continent. In his homily at an outdoor Mass on the shores of Lake Victoria, the Pope also spoke out against abortion, saying the "dignity of every human person from the moment of conception until natural death" must be respected. His sermon was delivered on the fourth day of his seventh visit to Africa.

Pope John Paul II called Monday for a new world drive to develop Africa and rekindle the optimism he said had vanished in a sea of suffering and poverty since independence. "What is needed on the part of people and nations, developed and developing, is a commitment to solidarity, directed to the good of all," he told an outdoor Mass of 25,000 people in this small town in southwestern Tanzania.