Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, meeting Pope Francis during a visit to the Vatican in 2016. Vatican announces historic papal trip to UAE
Pope Francis will visit the United Arab Emirates next year, becoming the first Pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, the Vatican has announced.
In a statement on December 6, the Vatican said the Pope will “participate in the International Interfaith Meeting on ‘Human Fraternity’” after receiving an invitation by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
“The visit will take place also in response to the invitation of the Catholic Church in the United Arab Emirates,” the Vatican said.
The trip, from February 3-5, will take place less than a week after Francis returns from his January 23-28 visit to Panama for World Youth Day.
Shortly after the announcement, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, welcomed the announcement of the Pope’s visit in a post on his personal Facebook page.
The visit, he said: “Will strengthen our ties and understanding of each other, enhance interfaith dialogue and help us to work together to maintain and build peace among the nations of the world.”
Talks tackling AIDS among children hosted by Vatican
Responding to the deaths of tens of thousands of children from AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses, the Vatican last week brought together physicians and representatives of drug companies and humanitarian agencies to strategise ways to improve care for children and adolescents who are HIV-positive. Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, convened a “dialogue” at the Vatican from December 6-7 on the diagnosis and treatment of paediatric HIV.
The meeting aimed to “address bottlenecks that limit access to early infant diagnostic products and programmes” as well as to “scale up strategies that can help quickly identify HIV-exposed children and link them to testing and treatment services” according to Caritas Internationalis, which helped sponsor the event.
While the global community has made great progress in improving access for adults to HIV and AIDS testing and treatment services, “more than 120,000 children continue to die each year from AIDS-related causes and over 13,000 children are newly infected each month”, said a Caritas press release.
Being Christian in name only is superficial – Pope
Christians are not people of Faith in name only, Pope Francis has said, explaining that they should trust in God, base their lives on his truth and seek to act on the teachings of Jesus.
People with faith in God have not put their hope only in words or in “vanity, pride, in the fleeting powers of life”, he said.
They put their hopes on solid ground – the Lord, he said in his homily during morning Mass at his residence last week at the Domus Sanctae Marthae.
In his homily, the Pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading in which Jesus tells his disciples that those who act on his teachings will have built their house on solid rock, while those who only listen to his word and do not act will be fools with a vulnerable house built on sand.
The Pope said the Advent season is a time for people to ask themselves: “Am I Christian in words or in deeds? Do I build my life on the rock of God or on the sand of the world, of vanity? Am I humble?”