By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Pope Leo XIV on Sunday urged Angolans to overcome divisions after decades of war at a Mass in a field outside Luanda and then during a prayer at a site that was once a hub for transatlantic slavery.
The first U.S.-born pope, who has become outspoken on war and inequality and angered President Donald Trump, celebrated Mass outside in Kilamba, a sprawling housing development, before travelling by helicopter to the Catholic shrine in Muxima.
During the Mass, he called Angola, which experienced a 27-year civil conflict from 1975 to 2002, a “beautiful yet wounded country”.
He urged Angolans to “build together a country where old divisions are overcome once and for all, where hatred and violence disappear.”
At the shrine, about 130 km southeast of the capital on the edge of the Kwanza River, throngs of people danced and sang in hot, humid weather as the pope was driven through the crowd in a white golf cart.
The shrine, now a popular religious site, was built as part of a 16th-century Portuguese fortress at the heart of the trade that historians estimate captured some six million people from what is now Angola to enslave and send to the Americas.
At the end of the Mass in Kilamba, the pope decried a recent ramp-up in the Ukraine war, calling “for the weapons to fall silent and for the path of dialogue to be followed”.
He also praised the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, to end fighting between Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah, as a “reason for hope”.
