Vatican City, Jul 9, 2011 / 13:04 pm
On the day the Republic of South Sudan becomes the world’s newest country, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., recalled Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to the troubled nation nearly 18 years ago.
“It was February 10, 1993, and John Paul II was at the end of an intense and extraordinary day in Khartoum,” Fr. Lombardi said in his weekly editorial as General Manager of Vatican Radio July 9.
“With his usual and extraordinary courage, he addressed the dramatic themes of justice and freedom in the presence of the governing authorities and was greeted with incredible enthusiasm by an immense crowd of Sudanese Catholics, for the most part displaced people from the south, fleeing from the violence of a civil war without end.”
The civil war that gripped Sudan was fought over two decades between a Muslim Arab-dominated north and a mainly Christian and animist south. It was a conflict that cost over two million lives, mainly civilians. Fr. Lombardi’s editorial quoted the words Pope John Paul II spoke that night in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum in 1993.