APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS to KAZAKHSTAN

Mr President of the Republic, Honourable Members of Government and the Diplomatic Corps, Distinguished Religious and Civil Authorities, Representatives of Civil Society and the World of Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen!
I offer you a cordial greeting and I thank the President for his kind words. I am honoured to be here with you, in this land as vast as it is ancient. I have come here as a pilgrim of peace, seeking dialogue and unity. Our world urgently needs peace: it needs to recover harmony. A ...

Dear brothers and sisters!
Let me address you in this direct and familiar way, as brothers and sisters. For that is how I would like to greet all of you – religious leaders and authorities, members of the diplomatic corps and of international organizations, representatives of academic and cultural institutions of civil society and various nongovernmental organizations – in the name of the fraternity that unites us as children of the same Heaven.
Before the mystery of the infinite that ...

The cross is a gibbet of death. Yet today we celebrate the exaltation of the cross of Christ, for on its wood Jesus took upon himself all our sin and the evil of our world, and vanquished them by his love. That is why we celebrate today’s Feast. The word of God that we have just heard tells us how, by contrasting serpents that bite with a serpent that saves. Let us reflect on these two images.
First, serpents that bite. These serpents attacked the people who had fallen once more into the ...

Dear brother bishops, priests and deacons, consecrated men and women, seminarians and pastoral workers, good morning!
I am pleased to be with you, to greet the Bishops’ Conference of Central Asia and to encounter a Church of so many different faces, histories and traditions, all united by our one faith in Christ Jesus. I thank Bishop Mumbiela Sierra for his kind words of greeting, in which he stated that “most of us are foreigners”. That is true, since you come from various places and ...

Dear brothers and sisters!
We have travelled this road together, and I thank you for coming from so many different parts of the world and for bringing with you the richness of your beliefs and cultures. Thank you for having taken part so intensely in these days of work, commitment and sharing in the service of dialogue. This is more valuable than ever in challenging times like our own, when the problems of the pandemic have been compounded by the utter folly of war. There are altogether too ...