At nearly 86, Pope Francis, still fighting, leaves Rome this Thursday for Bahrain, an island nation on the west coast of the Persian Gulf, his thirty-ninth apostolic trip outside Italy. Until Sunday, he will meet there with a modest Catholic Church, 11% of the population, mostly made up of foreigners. The main purpose of the visit is to lay a new stone to “A.dialogWith Islam, one of the main axes of his pontificate.
This small country of 1,470,000 inhabitants, however, offers two features that explain the context of this visit. Its Muslim majority, 65% of the population, is Shiite, close to neighboring Iran, but it is ruled by a Sunni minority whose royal family is linked to neighboring Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the second peculiarity is the expression of strong tension, as was rare before the Pope’s visit, expressed by humanitarian associations that condemn “religious discriminationthese shias suffered…
Source: Le Figaro
