标签： Oceania

On a sunlit Sunday outside Angola’s capital Luanda, a crowd of nearly 100,000 worshippers gathered under the open sky for the first public Mass held by Pope Leo XIV during his visit to the southern African nation, receiving a message of hope tailored to a country blessed with abundant natural resources yet haunted by systemic poverty and deep-seated division.

The pontiff’s arrival in Portuguese-speaking Angola on Saturday marked the third stop of an ambitious 11-day, four-nation tour across Africa, a journey that has already seen the leader of the Catholic Church speak out forcefully against systemic corruption and the ongoing foreign and domestic plunder of the continent’s rich natural endowments – and sparked a high-profile public dispute with United States President Donald Trump.

According to Vatican figures sourced from local Angolan authorities, the gathering at Kilamba, a planned community located roughly 30 kilometers from Luanda’s city center, drew an estimated 100,000 attendees. In his address to the assembled faithful, Pope Leo urged the crowd to embrace a hopeful vision of the future, framing the moment as a potential new beginning for a nation still carrying deep social and political scars from a 27-year civil war that only concluded in 2002.

“ It is within our power to build a nation where old divisions are laid to rest forever, where hatred and violence fade from memory, where the festering wound of corruption is healed by a new culture of justice and shared prosperity,” the pontiff told the assembled crowd.

Fresh off his previous stop in Cameroon, Pope Leo met immediately after his Saturday arrival with Angolan President Joao Lourenco and other senior government officials, where he doubled down on the sharp rhetorical tone that has defined his African trip, calling out the widespread human suffering driven by extreme poverty and the unregulated exploitation of Angola’s natural wealth.

As one of Africa’s leading oil producers and home to vast diamond reserves, Angola counts enormous natural wealth among its assets. Yet World Bank data reveals stark economic inequality across the country, with roughly one-third of its 36.6 million population living below the poverty line. Demographically, Angola is an overwhelmingly young nation, with an average population age of just 23 years old.

For many young attendees, the papal visit offered a rare opportunity to draw global attention to the systemic barriers facing Angola’s youth. Patricio Musanga, a 32-year-old attendee who traveled to the Mass wearing a branded t-shirt bearing Pope Leo’s image and a white cap, explained that he came seeking encouragement for young people, who face widespread unemployment that pushes thousands to migrate to Western countries each year in search of better opportunities.

“We are blessed with enormous natural wealth, yet we live with a shocking gap between the small fraction of the population that thrives and the majority that struggles,” Musanga told reporters. “The pope must hold our leaders accountable. I believe authorities will at least listen to what he has to say,” he added, echoing widespread calls for national reconciliation across the country.

Father Pedro Chingandu, a Catholic priest who traveled to the Mass from the eastern Angolan province of Moxico, echoed these sentiments. “Wealth is concentrated in the hands of just a tiny elite, and the decades-long civil war only made this systemic inequality far worse,” Chingandu explained to AFP. “What this country needs is real democracy, meaningful wealth redistribution, and equal access to justice for all.”

Following the open-air Mass in Kilamba, Pope Leo is scheduled to travel 110 kilometers by helicopter to the historic riverside town of Muxima, Angola’s most sacred Catholic pilgrimage site. The town is home to a 300-year-old church that overlooks the Kwanza River, once a primary transport route for enslaved African people trafficked to the Americas. The church houses a statue of the Virgin Mary known affectionately to local worshippers as “Mama Muxima,” and draws roughly two million pilgrims to the site each year. Originally built by Portuguese colonial settlers to baptize enslaved people before they were shipped downriver to the Atlantic and onward to the Americas, the site carries layered historical meaning for modern Angolan Catholics.

The Angolan government has drawn criticism in recent years for launching a multi-million-euro project to construct a grand new basilica in Muxima, with critics arguing that public funds would be better directed to addressing widespread poverty and basic infrastructure needs. Those economic grievances boiled over into public unrest last July, when a three-day wave of looting across Luanda and other major urban centers left roughly 30 people dead, with critics condemning what they described as a heavy-handed response by police forces. Analysts have framed the unrest as a clear signal of widespread public dissatisfaction with President Lourenco’s ruling MPLA party, which has held continuous control of the Angolan government since the country won independence from Portugal in 1975.

Pope Leo launched his 18,000-kilometer African journey earlier this week, with first stops in Algeria and Cameroon before traveling on to Angola. Speaking to reporters aboard his flight to Luanda, the pope, who is the first American pontiff in Catholic history, expressed regret that his public war of words with Donald Trump had overshadowed the core messages of his African trip. Trump previously labeled Pope Leo “weak” after the pontiff called for an immediate end to the ongoing war in the Middle East. “Entering into a public debate with the US president is not something that serves any of my goals,” the pope told reporters. After concluding his engagements in Angola, the pontiff will travel to Equatorial Guinea for the final stop of his continental tour.

The already volatile landscape of the Middle East has seen a fresh wave of destabilizing developments in recent days, even as a fragile 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah holds tenuously along the Israel-Lebanon border.

One of the most striking recent incidents is the deadly ambush that claimed the life of a French peacekeeper deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in southern Lebanon, leaving three additional service members wounded. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a swift and forceful condemnation of the attack, noting that an initial UNIFIL investigation points to Hezbollah as the perpetrator. France has formally placed blame on the militant group, though Hezbollah has issued a categorical denial of any involvement in the ambush.

Along the border, Lebanon’s military has begun moving to restore critical infrastructure damaged by weeks of cross-border fighting. Officials confirmed Sunday that a key highway connecting the city of Nabatieh to the Khardali region has been fully reopened to traffic, while a second major crossing, the Burj Rahal-Tyre bridge, is now partially operational. This incremental recovery comes as the ceasefire continues to hold in broad terms, though sporadic clashes have persisted. The Israeli military confirmed Saturday that one additional Israeli soldier had been killed in ongoing combat operations in southern Lebanon, marking the second Israeli military fatality since the truce went into effect Friday. To date, AFP’s tally based on official Israeli military data puts the total Israeli army death toll at 15 across six weeks of open conflict with Hezbollah. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has emphasized that the ceasefire cannot be a one-sided agreement, warning that his fighters remain on high alert and will respond immediately to any Israeli violation of the truce terms. “Because we do not trust this enemy, the resistance fighters will remain in the field with their hands on the trigger, and they will respond to violations accordingly,” Qassem said in a televised address Saturday. Despite the ceasefire, the Israeli military carried out an airstrike Saturday targeting what it described as a Hezbollah terrorist cell operating near its troops in southern Lebanon. Lebanese state media also reported that Israeli forces conducted demolition operations in multiple border towns, including Bint Jbeil, which saw some of the heaviest fighting before the truce took effect.

Beyond the Lebanese border, the wider regional conflict has triggered major shifts in geopolitics and global energy security. The strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil and liquefied natural gas shipments pass, has been re-closed by Iranian authorities. The closure came just one day after Iran briefly reopened the waterway following the announcement of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, after U.S. President Donald Trump rejected any easing of the American naval blockade of Iranian ports, insisting the restriction would remain in place until a comprehensive peace deal is reached to end the wider regional war. Iran’s leadership called the U.S. position unacceptable and reimposed the closure, a move Trump has labeled “Iranian blackmail.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy has issued a stark warning to commercial and military shipping, announcing that no vessels may depart anchorages in the Persian Gulf or Sea of Oman, and any ship attempting to approach the Strait of Hormuz will be treated as an enemy collaborator and targeted.

Diplomatic efforts to end the wider conflict between Iran, the U.S. and Israel remain stalled, according to senior Iranian officials. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a key member of Iran’s negotiation team, said in a televised address Saturday that while incremental progress has been made in bilateral talks with the U.S., major gaps and fundamental disagreements remain to be resolved. “We are still far from the final discussion,” Ghalibaf said. “We made progress in the negotiations, but there are many gaps and some fundamental points remain.” The human cost of the conflict for Iran has also been made public for the first time: Iranian state news agency ISNA quoted the country’s state-run Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs reporting that 3,468 Iranians have been killed since the start of the war with the U.S. and Israel.

The ongoing conflict has also triggered a major realignment in British foreign policy, according to government insiders. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration is preparing to introduce new legislation next month aimed at significantly deepening the country’s economic and political ties with the European Union, a shift accelerated by the Iran war and growing strains in the UK’s long-standing “special relationship” with the United States. Sources note that President Trump’s well-documented unpredictability and repeated public insults toward the U.K. have given added momentum to the move, which comes a full decade after British voters narrowly approved the decision to leave the 27-nation bloc.

On the second day of his high-stakes visit to Angola, a resource-rich southern African nation grappling with systemic widespread poverty, Pope Leo XIV led a massive open-air Holy Mass on Sunday that drew tens of thousands of pilgrims and hopeful attendees to the Kilamba district on the outskirts of the capital, Luanda.

The pontiff arrived in the Portuguese-speaking country Saturday to kick off the third leg of his 11-day, four-nation tour across the African continent. Immediately after landing, he held a formal meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco and top government officials, where he delivered sharp criticism of systemic oppression, the deep human suffering driven by extreme poverty, and the unregulated exploitation of Angola’s abundant natural resources. These remarks aligned with the core theme of his entire tour, which has centered on repeated warnings about the scourge of transnational corruption and the continued plunder of African natural wealth by foreign and domestic elites.

For many in the crowd, the Pope’s visit represented a rare opportunity to appeal for global attention to Angola’s paradox of plenty: a nation sitting on some of the continent’s largest reserves of crude oil and diamonds, yet marked by crippling income inequality. Thirty-two-year-old attendee Patricio Musanga, who wore a branded cap and T-shirt emblazoned with the Pope’s image, told reporters he had come seeking a message of encouragement for Angola’s struggling youth. Facing persistent mass unemployment, thousands of young Angolans flee every year to Western countries in search of better economic prospects. Musanga noted, “We are very rich in natural resources but … there is a glaring inequality between those who live well and the others,” adding that he hoped the Pope would reinforce that Angolans can build prosperous lives at home without leaving for opportunities abroad.

World Bank data underscores this gap: despite its status as one of Africa’s top crude oil producers, roughly one-third of Angola’s 36.6 million residents live below the international poverty line. Father Pedro Chingandu, who traveled from Angola’s eastern Moxico Province to attend the mass, pointed to decades of conflict as a key driver of persistent inequality. “There’s a concentration of wealth in the hands of very few, and of course the war just aggravated the situation,” he told Agence France-Presse, calling for “real democracy and the redistribution of wealth and justice” across the country. Angola has yet to fully heal from the 27-year civil war that broke out immediately after the nation gained independence from Portugal in 1975, only ending in 2002.

Following the Kilamba mass, Pope Leo is scheduled to travel 110 kilometers by helicopter to Muxima, Angola’s most sacred Catholic pilgrimage site. The small river town is home to a 300-year-old church that overlooks the Kwanza River, once a major transit route for enslaved Africans trafficked to the Americas. Built by Portuguese colonial settlers to baptize enslaved people before they were shipped across the Atlantic, the church houses the beloved statue of the Virgin Mary known locally as “Mama Muxima,” which draws two million pilgrims annually. Large crowds are expected to greet the pontiff during his stop at the historic slave-route shrine.

The Angolan government has drawn criticism for its multi-million-euro infrastructure project to build a new basilica, residential housing, and expanded public services in Muxima ahead of the Pope’s visit, with opponents questioning the government’s spending priorities at a time when widespread poverty persists across the country. Economic frustration already boiled over into public unrest last July, when a three-day looting spree across Luanda and other urban centers left roughly 30 people dead, many killed during what critics called a heavy-handed police crackdown. Political analysts have framed the unrest as a clear signal of widespread public dissatisfaction with the ruling socialist MPLA party, which has held uninterrupted control of the Angolan government since independence in 1975.

In comments to reporters on his flight to Angola, the Pope, who was elected to the papacy one year ago, opened up about a recent public dispute that has overshadowed much of his African tour. He expressed regret over his public war of words with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has attacked the Pope as “weak” after Leo called for an immediate ceasefire to end the ongoing war in the Middle East. “It is not in my interest at all” to publicly debate the U.S. leader, the Pope affirmed.

After wrapping up his engagements in Angola, Pope Leo will travel to Equatorial Guinea for the final stop of the 18,000-kilometer cross-continental tour, concluding a journey that has centered the needs of African nations and the urgent need for equitable global development.