| “May the Risen Christ, our hope, grant peace and comfort to the African peoples who are victims of violence and conflict, especially in Sudan and South Sudan”. Also in Urbi et Orbi, the Pope expressed his closeness to those populations, wounded by conflict, violence, and an intestine war that seemed to have died down precisely at Santa Marta when on 11 April 2019, Francis received the new South Sudanese political leadership at the Vatican, in the aftermath of the Church-brokered agreement to end the conflict that had claimed 400,000 lives between 2013 and 2018. Striking was the Pope’s gesture of bending down to kiss the feet of the two rival politicians, as if to mark once again the urgency of peace, of coming together, of confronting each other despite everything.
In South Sudan there is a Combonian bishop, Monsignor Christian Carlassare, whom Francis himself wanted to appoint in 2024 as head of a new diocese, that of Bentiu, enclosed in two territories: that of the Unity State, of which the city of Bentiu is the capital, and that of an autonomous administrative area of the Rouen, a population belonging to the Dinka tribe. “A great sorrow”“A witness to the lived faith, embodied in the Galilee of our history”: is the bishop’s remembrance to the Vatican media. In 2021, the Schio-born prelate, shortly after his episcopal appointment, was the victim of an ambush and was seriously wounded in the legs. ‘It is a great pain,“ he says, ‘to receive this message mixed with the joy of Easter and the joy that he was at least able to experience Easter with us”. His death, he emphasises, is linked “to this moment of the Resurrection, which is what we really believe in. We feel his figure is so strong for us, in the Church that has needed and continues to need witnesses’. “There is no death that holds”Monsignor Carlassare recalls the Pope’s closeness to South Sudan, “in many ways, with prayer, with his fatherhood and his call for peace, for harmony among people”. For this reason, ‘this is also a day of prayer and thanksgiving to the Lord for his mission that he has faithfully carried out, but also of prayer for the Church because we are called to bear witness to God’s merciful love that Pope Francis has in turn borne such strong witness to’. ‘Pope Francis,’ adds the Bishop of Bentiu, “leaving us this Easter Monday, seems to be telling us “courage, courage”. The Resurrection of Jesus tells us that in front of those who love with a true heart, there is no death that holds. And this is what has happened with the life of Pope Francis”. ‘He has opened up for us a marvellous path towards that new earth and those new heavens that are promised to us by Jesus and this calls us to be a renewed, reconciled Church that knows how to live in communion, in such divisive times in fact faith can make us recognise brothers’. Credits to: VATICAN NEWS (Italian site)
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Date Published:22 April 2025 Author:Alice, Office Manager
Article Tags: Latest news, South Sudan, Solidarity, Pope Francis, Bishop Carlassare, Reconciliation, Peace |
