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The head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV, will arrive in Angola today, the third country in his African tour.
The pontiff will become the third Pope to visit oil-rich Angola, where around 44% of the population are Catholics. Pope John Paul II visited in 1992, while Pope Benedict XVI visited in 2009.
He is expected to arrive in Angola’s capital, Luanda, at 1400 GMT after wrapping up his three-day trip to Cameroon with an open-air Mass at Yaounde airport. Billboards with the pope’s image have been stationed in Luanda ahead of his arrival.
Pope Leo XIV will meet Angola’s President Joao Lourenco and deliver a speech.
While he was in Cameroon, he was welcomed with fanfare. He is expected to experience a similar atmosphere in Angola, where tens of thousands of worshippers are set to gather to see him before he departs the southern African country on Tuesday.
The pontiff’s preaching during his African tour has warned against corruption in the mineral-rich continent, the plunder of its resources, and the dangers of artificial intelligence.
In Cameroon, he urged the country’s government to curb corruption and criticised its enablers, referring to them as “those who, in the name of profit, continue to seize the African continent to exploit and plunder it”.
A 33-year-old Angolan engineer, Antonio Masaidi, told AFP he hopes the Pope will see the needs of the country’s youths while in Angola.
“There is a lot of suffering, a lot of poverty in Angola. I hope the pope will see with his own eyes the needs of the youth here,” said Masaidi.
The Pope will celebrate an open-air Mass in Kilamba, on Luanda’s outskirts, on Sunday, where facilities, including a large food court, are being built to host tens of thousands of worshippers.
He is also expected to travel by helicopter to the village of Muxima, about 130 kilometres southeast of Luanda, home to a 16th-century church overlooking the Kwanza River that has become one of southern Africa’s most important pilgrimage sites.
The Pope will thereafter fly to Equatorial Guinea, the final stop of his African tour that began in Algeria.
