Pope
Francis will call for inter-Korean reconciliation during his trip to
South Korea next week but is not expected to travel to the
demilitarised zone, the Vatican says
VATICAN
CITY — Pope Francis travels to South Korea this week with a
message of peace for the divided peninsula on his first papal visit
to Asia, where the Catholic Church is undergoing dramatic growth. The
77-year-old will fly into Seoul on Wednesday in a trip also aimed at
making up for his predecessor Benedict XVI never visiting Asia during
his whole eight-year papacy.
Vatican
watchers say Francis will address the whole continent on the
seven-day trip where the number of Catholics, although only 3.2% of
the population, is rocketing. With the Roman Catholic Church dogged
by increasing secularism in the West, “it’s a chance for the
pontiff to flash a thumbs-up to a region upon which Catholicism is
increasingly reliant”, said Vatican expert John Allen, who writes
for the Boston Globe. In January, the pope will return to Asia on a
trip to Sri Lanka and the Philippines—the region’s largest
Catholic country—to nurture the burgeoning number of faithful and
would-be clerics from China to India, Myanmar and Vietnam.
As
a young man, Francis dreamed of becoming a missionary in Japan, where
Catholics in the 18th and 19th centuries kept their faith alive
without the help of priests, who had been expelled or murdered by the
imperial government. In South Korea, he will preside over a
beatification ceremony for 124 Korean martyrs and is expected to use
his speech to warn of a recent escalation in anti-Christian
persecution from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria and Somalia.
In
the last census to include religious affiliation in 2005, close to
30% of South Koreans identified themselves as Christian. The majority
are Protestants, but Catholics are the fastest growing group with
around 5.3 million adherents—just over 10% of the population. In
North Korea, the Church is only allowed to operate within the
confines of the state-controlled Korean Catholics Association (KCA).
The country is repeatedly ranked worst for oppression of Christians
by international watchdogs. The pope will hold a mass in Seoul’s
cathedral for reconciliation between the two Koreas which remain
technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in a ceasefire
rather than a peace treaty.
Seoul’s
Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, who crossed into North Korea for a
historic one-day visit in May, said he hoped Francis would bring
about “a great miracle” for dialogue between Korea’s Communist
and capitalist halves. Reports that the pope may pray at the
demilitarised zone between the two Koreas—in an echo of his
impromptu stop at Israel’s separation wall during a trip to
Bethlehem earlier this year—were ruled out by the Vatican. However,
spokesman Federico Lombardi said “the pope is always capable of
surprises”. Religious watchers have also speculated that Francis
might take the chance to travel on to Beijing in a bid to ease a
bitter feud between the Church and China’s Communist regime, which
has its own state-controlled Catholic Church.
During
the visit to South Korea, the first by a pope, he will meet relatives
of the victims of the Sewol ferry, which sank in April with the loss
of some 300 lives—most of them children. He will also meet Korean
women forced into sex slavery for Japanese troops during World War
II, invited by organizers to attend the pope’s August 18 mass.
The
pontiff, a champion of the weak and downtrodden, will visit a center
for the handicapped and is also expected to reach out to those left
behind by the country’s rapid economic growth, repeating his famous
call for “a poor church for the poor”. “The Korean Church is
learning to pay attention to the poor, but today there is still a
risk of it coming across as a church of the rich, for the rich,”
Vincenzo Bordo, a lay missionary in South Korea, told the Vatican
Insider website. “Many
hope that the pope’s visit will act as an impetus” for change, he
said.
