Pope Francis leads prayer, meets with displaced children and women in South Sudan

Pope Francis led an open-air prayer vigil at a mausoleum for South Sudan’s liberation hero John Garang on Saturday, attended by 50,000 faithful.

The Pope, along with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Church of Scotland Moderator Iain Greenshields, travelled to South Sudan in an unprecedented joint “pilgrimage of peace”

South Sudan broke from Sudan in 2011, but plunged into civil war in 2013 with ethnic groups turning on each other. Despite a 2018 peace deal, bouts of inter-ethnic fighting have continued to kill and displace large numbers of civilians.

Ahead of the prayer vigil, Pope Francis met with some of those internally displaced women and children.

“The future cannot lie in refugee camps,” the Pope said after listening to the stories of children who have been impacted by the violence in South Sudan.

“You bear the burden of a painful past, yet you never stop dreaming of a better future. In our meeting today, we would like to give wings to your hope.

There are 2.2 million internally displaced people in South Sudan and another 2.3 million have fled the country as refugees.

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