CAIRO — In video posted online this week by the Vatican, Pope Francis sounds excited about his two-day trip to Egypt starting Friday, despite recent terrorist attacks.
“As salaam alaikum — peace be with you! … Thank you for having invited me to visit Egypt, which you call Umm al Dunya, Mother of the World,” the pope read from prepared remarks in Italian as he sat behind a desk at the Vatican. “Our world, torn by blind violence, which has also afflicted the heart of your dear land, needs peace, love and mercy.”
This will be the first papal trip to the Muslim-majority nation since Pope John Paul II visited in 2000. Pope Francis plans to fly from Rome to Cairo to encourage dialogue with Muslim leaders and to show solidarity with Christians across the Middle East at a time of great division and violence.
Islamic State extremists this year declared a campaign against Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who account for about 10 percent of the country’s population of 92 million, making the group the nation’s largest religious minority. About 270,000 of the country’s Christians are Catholic.
Extremists have attacked a monastery, churches and Christian strongholds to the north, east and south of the capital.
In December, a suicide bomber detonated explosives at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church, also known as Botroseya church, a chapel next to Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo, killing 29 people.
On Palm Sunday this month, Islamic State suicide bombers again targeted churches to the north in Alexandria and Tanta, killing 47 people.
Naguib Gobrael, a Coptic Christian activist who leads the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said he hopes victims of the attacks are able to meet the pope. Many Coptic Christians were encouraged by the pope’s bravery in not canceling his trip, he said.
“It will send a message to the whole world when the pope visits Egypt, that the pope visited even after the churches were attacked,” said Gobrael.
Francis is expected to start his visit by meeting with Egyptian leaders including President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Coptic Orthodox Church Pope Tawadros II and Sheikh Ahmed Tayeb, the grand imam of Al Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam’s paramount seat of learning, in Cairo’s Heliopolis district.
