POPE Francis’ visit to the United States was profoundly moving. His address to the Joint Session of the US Congress could have earned hateful jeers for him from rowdy conservatives who dislike Pope Francis’ unabashed advocacy for the poor, the excluded and the discarded. But in soft-spoken English, he allowed the lives of four great Americans speak the message of their lives to the core of the American soul – Abraham Lincoln for freedom, Martin Luther King for dreams, Dorothy Day for social justice, and Thomas Merton for spirituality. Within this framework he was able to draw attention to the importance of the family, the welfare of immigrants, the sacredness of the environment. The speech was intimate, powerful, and fully disarming. At its end, partisan lines had been erased, and all stood to give the non-pontificating Pope a prolonged standing ovation.

Perhaps the most powerful of his speeches was to the United Nations. On the other side of the world, on the sacred feast of Eid’l Adha, terrorist suicide bombers attacked the al Badr and al Hashoosh mosques in Sana’a Yemen, killing 102 Shia Muslims and wounding 361. The extremist ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. In what was possibly the most moving part of this speech, Pope Francis said, “…while regretting to have to do so, I must renew my repeated appeals regarding the painful situation of the entire Middle East, North Africa and other South African countries, where Christians, together with other cultural or ethnic groups, and even members of the majority religion who have no desire to be caught up in hatred and folly, have been forced to witness the destruction of their houses of worship, their cultural and religious heritage, their houses and property, and have faced the alternative of fleeing or of paying for their adhesion to good and to peace by their own lives, or by enslavement.”

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