Pope Leo XIV arrived April 21 in Equatorial Guinea, the fourth and final country of his 11-day apostolic journey in Africa, where the pope met the country’s longtime ruler and urged the country’s civil authorities to choose justice over power, quoting St. Augustine’s “City of God.”
In a country marred by hardship, deep faith and hard-won independence, Pope Leo XIV pointed to Algeria as a living witness to what he called the Church’s “guiding principle above all.”
Pope Leo XIV honored the memory of Algeria’s Christian martyrs Monday evening, telling the country’s tiny Catholic community that the blood of those who died for their faith remains “a living seed that never ceases to bear fruit.”
Pope Leo XIV arrived in Algeria on the morning of April 13, becoming the first pope to make an apostolic journey to the North Africa nation, the first stop of the pope’s 11-day, four-country tour of Africa.
Pope Leo XIV’s upcoming four-nation trip to Africa is stirring hope for a religious sister in the Diocese of Brooklyn who monitors ongoing political and social strife in her native country, Cameroon.
The expression of solidarity came amid the Trump administration’s recent foreign aid cutbacks for Africa. Meanwhile, Christians on the African continent — including thousands of Catholics — face violent religious persecution.
At the end of his first foreign trip as pope, a trip focused on dialogue, Pope Leo XIV said the examples of friendship and respect he had seen could be a helpful example for people in North America and Europe, too.
Father Hilaire Belizaire, pastor of St. Jerome Parish in East Flatbush, described the ordination of 10 Franciscan priests in Uganda as one of the most powerful experiences of his recent pilgrimage to Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa has replaced Europe as the locus for the world’s Christians, due to both higher birthrates and Western Europe’s “widespread Christian disaffiliation” – with Christians declining as a share of the world’s population due to adherents leaving the faith, according to new research by the Pew Research Center.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has renewed a longstanding pledge of solidarity with Africa, highlighting a blossoming Catholic population and the need for the U.S. government to provide the continent with more support.
