By Joshua McElwee and Catherine Cartier
BEIRUT, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Pope Leo ends a three-day visit to Lebanon on Tuesday, wrapping up his first overseas trip as Catholic leader, during which he pleaded for peace in the Middle East and warned that humanity’s future was at risk from the world’s bloody conflicts.
The first U.S. pope, Leo will pray at the site of a 2020 chemical explosion at the Beirut port and lead a Catholic Mass on the city’s waterfront expected to draw 100,000 people before leaving for Rome with his entourage at about 1:15 pm (1115 GMT).
The pope, who has said he is on a mission of peace, has urged Lebanon’s leaders to persevere with peace efforts after last year’s devastating war between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, and continued Israeli strikes.
POPE URGES FAITHS TO UNITE TO HEAL LEBANON
Leo, a relative unknown on the world stage before becoming pope in May, has been closely watched as he made his first speeches overseas and interacted for the first time with people outside mainly Catholic Italy.
Meeting on Monday with leaders from Lebanon’s many diverse religious sects, Leo urged them to unite to heal the country after years of conflict, political paralysis and economic crisis that have prompted waves of migration.
He called Christian, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim, and Druze leaders to show that people of different traditions “can live together and build a country united by respect and dialogue”.
The 70-year-old pontiff visited Lebanon on the second leg of a trip that started in Turkey.
‘PAIN AFTER PAIN’
Maroun al-Mallah, a 21-year-old student of landscape engineering, arrived at the site of Leo’s Mass before dawn to volunteer and said the visit could be a reset for Lebanon.
“It was lovely to know there was a sign of hope coming back to Lebanon,” Mallah told Reuters.
“Even in university, we just think what could come next. It’s just pain after pain after pain … especially after the third biggest explosion happened” at the port, he said.
The 2020 explosion at the Beirut port killed 200 and caused damage worth billions of dollars, but an investigation into the cause has been stymied, with no one held to account.
Leo is expected to pray at the site, lay a wreath of flowers at a memorial and greet some blast survivors and relatives of the victims.
He will also visit one of Lebanon’s psychiatric hospitals, run by nuns of the Franciscan order.
Lebanon, which has the largest proportion of Christians in the Middle East, has been rocked by the spillover of the Gaza conflict as Israel and Hezbollah went to war, culminating in a devastating Israeli offensive.
The country, which hosts 1 million Syrian and Palestinian refugees, is also struggling to overcome a severe economic crisis after decades of profligate spending sent the economy into a tailspin in late 2019.
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee and Catherine Cartier; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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