Pope Francis said Sunday he was praying for the “suffering peoples of the Middle East,” at the end of a visit to Bahrain that promoted dialogue with Islam but was marred by allegations of rights abuses in the Gulf state.
In a final address before boarding a flight to Rome, he also urged parishioners to “pray for Ukraine, which is suffering so much” and for an end to the war.
He told Lebanese parishioners he prays for “Your beloved country, which is so weary and so tried, and for all the peoples who are suffering in the Middle East.”
The 85-year-old Argentine used his four-day visit to Muslim-majority Bahrain to meet with both senior Muslim officials and Catholic residents of the Gulf, home to a large community of migrant workers.
On Saturday, he held an open-air mass for about 30,000 people, many of whom were moved to tears at the occasion.
Bahrain, which formalized ties with the Holy See in 2000, has around 80,000 Catholic residents. Most are workers from the Philippines and other Asian countries.
On Sunday, the final morning of the first-ever papal visit to the island nation, Pope Francis visited Sacred Heart Church in Manama and urged Catholics to “tirelessly promote dialogue” with other faiths.
— Call to unity —
“Let us try to be custodians and builders of unity … in the multi-religious and multi-cultural societies that we are in,” he said at the Gulf’s oldest church, which opened in 1939.
His words came a day after police briefly arrested relatives of Bahraini prisoners on death row who had protested and asked to meet the pope, according to a London-based rights group – although authorities denied there had been “fears”. .
Human rights groups have long cited discrimination, repression and harassment by Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim rulers against Shia opposition figures and activists.
Human Rights Watch has accused Bahraini courts of handing down death sentences on the basis of “manifestly unfair trials.”
In his first speech on Thursday, the Pope spoke of the “right to life” and the “need to always guarantee this right, even for those who are being punished, whose lives should not be taken”.
Finance Minister Sheikh Salman bin Khalifa Al-Khalifa told AFP that Bahrain has “robust and far-reaching human rights and criminal justice protections” and that the Pope’s comment on the death penalty did not single out Bahrain.
This was the Pope’s second trip to the Gulf after a visit to the United Arab Emirates in 2019. He met in Bahrain with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of the prestigious Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo.
He also used the trip to warn that the world was facing a “sensitive abyss” and denounced the “opposing blocs” of East and West – a veiled reference to the stalemate surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Some potentates are engaged in a determined struggle for party interests, relaunching outdated rhetoric, reshaping spheres of influence and defying blocs,” he said.
The Pope, who is confined to a wheelchair and cane due to knee problems, was due to leave for Rome at around 13:00 (1000 GMT). He was supposed to speak to journalists during the flight.
