Pope Benedict this week makes his first trip to Africa where he will urge developed nations grappling with the economic crisis not to forget the continent where survival is a daily struggle for millions.
The March 17-23 visit to Cameroon and Angola will give the pope, who has sometimes been called "Eurocentric," a chance to speak out on other issues facing the continent - war, corruption and sometimes tense relations between Christians and Muslims.
Although he is visiting only two countries, the message will be continent-wide, particularly as the pope will be holding several meetings with bishops from every African country.
"I intend to ideally embrace the entire continent, its thousand differences, its deep religious soul, its ancient cultures, its weary path of development and reconciliation, its grave problems, its painful wounds and its enormous potential and hope," he said on Sunday.
"In particular, I am thinking of the victims of hunger, sickness, injustices, fratricidal conflicts and every form of violence that unfortunately continues," he told pilgrims and tourists in St Peters Square. In the 20th century Africas Catholic population shot up from about 2 million in 1900 to about 140 million in 2000, making the continent ever more important to the Vatican as the number of practicing Catholics in the developed world declines.
The pope goes to Africa at a time when charity groups, UN organisations and non-governmental organisations have warned of "sympathy fatigue" by donor nations as the world grapples with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
So far, no African country is on track to reach all of the UN Millennium Development Goals on poverty eradication, human rights, equality, the environment, health and education. "Even though the crisis has been slow in reaching Africas shores, we all know it is coming and its impact will be severe," IMF Managing Director Dominque Strauss-Kahn said last week.
POVERTY ON THE RISE:
The United Nations has projected that the number of Africans living in extreme poverty, defined as making less than a dollar a day, will rise to 404 million by 2015. Some 800 million Africans suffer chronic hunger and the crisis is already affecting remittances from Africans abroad who lose their jobs.
The pope will spend about three and a half days in each country, starting in the Cameroon capital of Yaounde, where he will deliver a working document for a Catholic Church synod on Africa due to take place at the Vatican in September.
In Yaounde, he will visit a hospice where he will likely talk of AIDS. The disease has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Some 22.5 million people are living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The Church teaches that fidelity within heterosexual marriage, chastity and abstinence are the best ways to stop AIDS. It does not approve condoms but some Church leaders have been calling for allowing their use in rare cases between married heterosexual couples where one partner has the disease.
In Angola, a former Portuguese colony living with a fragile political stability since a 27-year civil war that killed 1.5 million people ended in 2002, he is expected to push for negotiations to solve conflicts in other countries. More than 20 African nations have been involved in armed conflict since 1990 and the pope is expected to appeal to the international community to stop arms trafficking.
In Cameroon he meets Muslim leaders. Although Christian-Muslim relations in both countries are good, his message will likely have a continent-wide significance. Christian-Muslim tensions have exploded into violence in a number of African countries, notably Nigeria and Sudan.