Pope Francis’ trip to the DRC is the first papal visit since John Paul II travelled there in 1985.
The 86-year-old leader of the Catholic church will start his trip on Tuesday in the Congolese capital Kinshasa before heading to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on Friday.
The Vatican’s envoy to the DRC, where Catholics make up about half of the population, has said the trip will remind the world not to ignore decades-long conflicts there.
An estimated 5.7 million people are internally displaced in the DRC and 26 million face severe hunger, largely because of the impact of armed conflict by multiple rebel groups, according to the United Nations.
The trip will be Francis’s 40th abroad since he was elected supreme pontiff in 2013 following the resignation of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. Over the course of these trips, the pope has visited 59 countries.
Pope Francis’ trip to the DRC is the first visit by a pope since John Paul II travelled there in 1985 – it was still known as Zaire at the time.
The DRC is the second-largest country in Africa and has a population of some 90 million people. The Church runs about 40 percent of the country’s health facilities and about 6 million children are taught in Catholic schools.
The countries the pope has visited include:
Americas
- Brazil: July 2013
- Bolivia: July 2015
- Ecuador: July 2015
- Paraguay: July 2015
- United States: September 2015
- Cuba: September 2015, February 2016
- Mexico: February 2016
- Colombia: September 2017
- Chile: January 2018
- Peru: January 2018
- Panama: January 2019
- Canada: July 2022
Asia
- South Korea: August 2014
- Sri Lanka: January 2015
- Philippines: January 2015
- Armenia: June 2016
- Georgia: September 2016
- Azerbaijan: October 2016
- Myanmar: November 2017
- Bangladesh: November 2017
- Thailand: November 2019
- Japan: November 2019
- Kazakhstan: September 2022
Africa
- Kenya: November 2015
- Uganda: November 2015
- Central African Republic: November 2015
- Egypt: April 2017
- Morocco: March 2019
- Mozambique: September 2019
- Madagascar: September 2019
- Mauritius: September 2019
- Democratic Republic of Congo: January 2023
- South Sudan: February 2023 (planned)
Europe
- Albania: September 2014
- France: November 2014
- Turkey: November 2014
- Bosnia and Herzegovina: June 2015
- Greece: April 2016
- Poland: July 2016
- Sweden: October 2016
- Portugal: May 2017
- Switzerland: June 2018
- Ireland: August 2018
- Estonia: September 2018
- Latvia: September 2018
- Lithuania: September 2018
- Bulgaria: May 2019
- North Macedonia: May 2019
- Romania: May 2019
- Hungary: September 2021
- Slovakia: September 2021
- Cyprus: December 2021
- Greece: December 2021
- Malta: April 2022
Middle East
- Israel: May 2014
- Jordan: May 2014
- Palestine: May 2014
- United Arab Emirates: February 2019
- Iraq: March 2019
- Bahrain: November 2022
