Malabo (Equatorial Guinea) (AFP) – Pope Leo XIV on Thursday held an open-air mass in Equatorial Guinea in front of tens of thousands of followers, wrapping up his first major international tour that began with harsh criticism of his stance on Iran from US President Donald Trump. The leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has been in the closed-off central African nation since Tuesday, where he took aim at the suppression of civic freedoms and called for prisoners to be better treated in a country infamous for its brutal jails.
On his final day in the oil-rich former Spanish colony of two million people, where most of the population lives in poverty, he officiated at a mass before 30,000 people at a stadium in Malabo, the former capital. He was due to arrive back in Rome at about 8:00 pm (1800 GMT). On the way, he will speak to reporters travelling with him, with his remarks eagerly awaited after Trump’s attacks. Trump called the US-born pontiff “very weak on crime and other things” and said he was “wrong” to call for an end to violence in the Iran war, in comments that cast a pall over the early stages of his four-country, 11-day Africa tour. The pope later expressed regret that his speeches were being interpreted as a response to the US leader’s criticism and maintained he had no interest in debating with him.
Yet throughout the trip, from Algeria to Cameroon, then on to Angola and Equatorial Guinea, he piled high his calls for social justice, peace and respect for human dignity, while denouncing inequality, corruption and the unfair exploitation of natural resources by “tyrants”. His newly forceful style, blasting those who “in the name of profit, continue to lay their hands on the African continent to exploit and plunder it”, was a marked departure from the restraint he has shown since he was elected in May last year. Leaders of the four countries he visited have all been criticised — in varying degrees — for authoritarian tendencies.
Equatorial Guinea, ruled with an iron fist by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema since 1979, has long faced claims of human rights abuses as well as the trampling of civil freedoms. But he urged the country to place itself “in the service of law and justice” and condemned “troubling hygienic and sanitary conditions” for prisoners. On Wednesday, the pope went to Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Bata prison, where he was greeted by hundreds of shaven-headed inmates in the driving rain.
Pope Leo — born Robert Francis Prevost — is at 70 relatively young for a pope and has shown energy that contrasts sharply with the declining health of his Argentinian predecessor, Francis, who died a year ago at 88. His next trip abroad will be to Spain from June 6 to 12.
© 2024 AFP
