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Pope Francis Heads to Cyprus Aiming to Highlight Plight of Migrants

Pope Francis arrived in Cyprus on Thursday, beginning a five-day trip that would also bring him to Greece and its island of Lesbos, where in 2016 he made a defining visit to refugees living in horrid conditions and brought some back to Rome on his plane.

The trip, the 35th abroad for Francis, who turns 85 later this month, reflects his determination to maintain a global focus on the plight of migrants and lands torn by strife, despite the world’s preoccupation this week with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

The journey — which began as the Vatican said the pope had accepted the resignation of Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris, after French news media reports about his relationship with a woman — will have other hallmarks of the Francis papacy, including supporting tiny Catholic minorities and reaching out to other religious leaders, this time in the Greek Orthodox Church. Francis, who met with asylum-seekers at the Vatican near the airport before leaving for Cyprus will help relocate to Italy some migrants in Cyprus — and possibly Lesbos again.

After being greeted on the tarmac in Cyprus by dignitaries, church officials and children chanting “Francis, we love you,” Francis spoke at a ceremony at the presidential palace. “I have come as a pilgrim to a country geographically small, but historically great,” Francis said. “To an island that down the centuries has not isolated peoples but brought them together; to a land whose borders are the sea; to a place that is the eastern gate of Europe and the western gate of the Middle East.”

The trip is the third international one this year for the pope, who is believed to have received a booster shot, though that has not been confirmed. He made a historic pilgrimage to Iraq in March and a politically symbolic trip to Hungary and Slovakia in September during which he delivered a strong message against the dangers of nationalism.

This trip seeks to refocus attention on the priorities of his pontificate, including opening borders and welcoming the destitute, and comes as migrants are again facing awful conditions and tragic deaths, including at the Belarus-Poland border and in the English Channel, where at least 27 people died last week. But it also comes at an unpredictable and deeply concerning phase of the pandemic, as countries around the world shut their borders to try to protect their populations from a variant whose effects are still very much unknown.

“The recommendation in general is prudence,” Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, said when asked about coronavirus precautions and worries that the new variant would eclipse the main themes of the trip. Francis himself spoke on Thursday about how “Cyprus has been darkened by the pandemic, which has prevented many visitors from visiting it and seeing its beauty” and damaged its economy.

Francis is the second pope, after his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to visit Cyprus, and on Thursday he met with Lebanese and local Catholics at the Maronite Cathedral of Our Lady of Grace. Cyprus is an ancient Christian land and tradition holds that St. Paul arrived here around A.D. 46 to preach the Gospel with Barnabas, a Cypriot and a saint.

Francis, at the cathedral, said he was “visiting this land and journeying as a pilgrim in the footsteps of the great apostle Barnabas” and argued that the diversity of the church “reflects Cyprus’ own place in the European continent” and the island’s “history of intertwined peoples, a mosaic of encounters.” He added, “walls do not and should not exist in the Catholic Church.”

He then rode in a Fiat 500, surrounded by a motorcade, to the president’s palace, where, after walking on red carpets before color guards and marching bands he told the dignitaries, many wearing masks emblazoned with their national flags, that Cyprus, as a “geographic, historical, cultural and religious crossroads, is in a position to be a peacemaker. May it be a workshop of peace in the Mediterranean.”

While the Cypriot government has complained about having the highest percentage of migrants in the European Union given its tiny population, Francis put the statistic in a more positive light, calling it only the latest layer in a variegated texture centuries in the making. He acknowledged though that maintaining “the multicolored and multifaceted beauty of the whole is no easy thing.”

Nicos Anastasiades, the Cyprus president, told Francis that it would make available land to the Vatican to build an embassy, but in the meantime Francis will stay at a Franciscan monastery in Nicosia — the divided capital of Cyprus. The medieval city is separated into a Greek side and Turkish side, which are split by a U.N.-protected buffer zone.

He will then spend Saturday reaching out to Orthodox leaders and meeting with officials before traveling on Sunday to Lesbos, which Mr. Bruni said had “become a symbolic place.”

Francis also tried to make a symbol out of Cyprus for Europe, which he said was held back by “nationalist interests,” but the island is far from a tranquil place.

The country has effectively been partitioned since 1974, when a coup sponsored by the military junta that controlled Greece at the time ousted the government of Cyprus, and Turkey invaded, arguing that the Turkish Cypriots needed its protection. It is divided along ethnic lines.

The internationally recognized government of the Republic of Cyprus controls the southern two-thirds of it, and the remaining third is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey. Unification efforts in Cyprus, which joined the European Union in 2004, start and stop periodically,

most recently in 2017. Those talks broke down over Turkey’s refusal to remove its troops. They led to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declaring “Turkey will be in Cyprus forever,” and rejecting a unified federation. On Thursday, with the pope listening at his side, Mr. Anastasiades emphatically lamented the injustices of what he called the Turkish invasion and occupation.

A recent uptick in migrant arrivals has intensified hard-right, nationalist sentiment and the resistance of the Republic of Cyprus government, which has sought to stop processing asylum requests. But the spike in numbers, and suspicions that Turkey is funneling the migrants to the border, has deepened the animosity between the north and the south.

With Turkey to the north, Syria to the East, Israel to the South and Greece to the West, Cyprus is a small, stingray-shaped island between worlds and a crossroads for cultures and migrations.

Nearly 80 percent of the island’s population is Orthodox Christian, and about 20 percent is Sunni Muslim. There is only a tiny population of Catholics, about 38,000, who mostly fall under the jurisdiction of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and who trace their roots to the Crusades. That is less than the estimated number of Turkish troops based in the north.

Rev. Georgios Armand Houry, a Cypriot priest, said that many Catholics were hoping that the pope would help members of the faith “return home” to uninhabited towns after displacement earlier during the conflict.

During Benedict’s 2010 trip, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, the leader of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, accused Turkey of an “obscure plan” to take over the entire island and called for the pope’s “active cooperation” in resolving the longstanding dispute.

The north continues to use the Turkish lira and has an economy closely tied to the Turkish mainland.

In recent years, tensions have risen after the discovery of rich natural gas deposits under the eastern Mediterranean. Greece, with its islands scattered in the area, claims that it has sole drilling rights. The potential for enormous wealth from the deposits has created a profit-sharing unity among surrounding nations, including Greece, Israel, Israel, Egypt, Italy and Jordan.

But Turkey has used northern Cyprus as its toehold, sending drilling ships, accompanied by warships, to explore for gas off Cyprus; that, in turn, has prompted retribution by the European Union against Turkish companies. The prospect of an armed clash between Greece and Turkey, two NATO allies with centuries of bad blood, has proved worrying.

“The greatest wound suffered by this land has been the terrible laceration it has endured in recent decades,” Francis said, urging dialogue as the only way forward towards reconciliation. “I think of the deep suffering of all those people unable to return to their homes and their places of worship. I pray for your peace, for the peace of the entire island, and I make it my fervent hope.”

He added, “Let us nurture hope by the power of gestures, rather than by gestures of power.”

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