Pope Francis poses with the Colombian bishops in the Holy See. VATICAN MEDIA / HANDOUT (EFE)
Pope Francis has asked the Colombian bishops to patiently support the path of peace and reconciliation in the country and for every leader who aspires to it, regardless of the political current to which they belong. He did this by meeting at the Vatican for almost two hours this Friday with a group of 38 prelates, including those from Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Florencia, Ibagué, Nueva Pamplona, Tunja and Villavicencio.
“The Pope has asked us to work for peace without giving up,” Monsignor Luis José Rueda, Archbishop of Bogotá and President of the Colombian Bishops’ Conference, told the press after the meeting. “First of all, the Father asked us never to give up our peace efforts,” agreed Monsignor Luis Manuel Alí, secretary general of the Colombian Episcopate, to El Tiempo newspaper. “He reminded us that it is a slow, manual process of comings and goings that is easy to get discouraged, but he told us that at no point could we as pastors stop promoting peace in Colombia as a pastoral and to have evangelizing priority.”
The Pope also urged them to “encircle the leaders who seek peace, whoever they are, wherever they come from,” declared the Bishop of Nueva Pamplona, Jorge Alberto Ossa Soto, according to the Efe news agency after the meeting . “The Pope told us that in peace processes we have to be very patient, that sometimes we want everything to come out quickly, but when there has been a process with so much violence, we have to be patient and get used to peace,” he explained .
Colombia, eager to end the violence, has failed to end an armed conflict spanning more than half a century that has involved guerrillas, paramilitary groups and state forces. Pope Francis visited the country back in September 2017 with the aim of supporting the process of reconciliation of society and the political class, disarmed and very divided after the signing of the peace agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas today transformed into a political party seated in Congress.
After the brace that Iván Duque’s four-year peace effort has brought, Gustavo Petro’s government intends to return to negotiations with various armed groups within the framework of total peace, one of the axes of its mandate. The President of Colombia – who visited Francis a year ago in the middle of the election campaign at the Holy See – wants to implement the agreement with the extinct FARC more resolutely, to enter into dialogue with the ELN, the last armed guerrillas, and at least part of the dissidences that distanced themselves from the peace process, in addition to a policy of submission to other criminal groups such as the Clan del Golfo, the largest drug trafficking gang.
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