NewsLatin AmericaPope Francis asks the bishops of Colombia to support peace

Pope Francis asks the bishops of Colombia to support peace

Pope Francis poses with the Colombian bishops at the Holy See.VATICAN MEDIA / HANDOUT (EFE)

Pope Francis has asked the Colombian bishops to patiently support the path of peace and reconciliation in the country, and to any leader who seeks it, regardless of the political current to which he belongs. He did so by meeting this Friday for almost two hours in the Vatican with a group of 38 prelates that included those from Bogota, Bucaramanga, Florencia, Ibague, Nueva Pamplona, ​​Tunja and Villavicencio.

“The pontiff has asked us to work for peace without giving up,” Monsignor Luis Jose Rueda, archbishop of Bogota and president of the Colombian Episcopal Conference, told the press after the meeting. “In the first place, the father has asked us to never give up our efforts for peace,” agreed Monsignor Luis Manuel Ali, secretary general of the Colombian episcopate, in statements to the newspaper Time. “He reminded us that it is a slow, handmade process, of comings and goings, in which one can easily get discouraged, but he told us that as pastors we could not at any time stop having peace in Colombia as a pastoral and evangelizing priority.”

The Pope also asked them to “surround the leaders who seek peace, whoever they are, whatever they are from,” the Bishop of Nueva Pamplona, ​​Jorge Alberto Ossa Soto, explained after the meeting, according to the Efe news agency. “The Pope told us that we have to be very patient in peace processes, that sometimes we want everything to come out quickly, but when there has been a process of so much violence, we have to be patient and acclimatize peace,” he explained.

After the parenthesis that Ivan Duque’s four-year period in peace efforts meant, the Government of Gustavo Petro intends to return to negotiations with different armed groups as part of total peace, one of the axes of his mandate. The president of Colombia – who visited Francis a year ago in the Holy See in the middle of the campaign – intends to implement the agreement with the extinct FARC with greater determination, dialogue with the ELN, the last guerrilla in arms, and at least with a part of the dissidences that distanced themselves from the peace process, in addition to advancing a policy of submission to other criminal groups, such as the Clan del Golfo, the largest drug trafficking gang.

newsletter

Analysis of current affairs and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox

RECEIVE THE

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Latest Posts

Read More
More