Pope consoles Congolese victims: 'Your pain is my pain'
Pope Francis on Wednesday urged Congo’s people to forgive those who committed “inhuman violence” against them, celebrating a Mass for 1 million people and then hearing first hand of the atrocities some of them have endured: a teen-age girl “raped like an animal” for months; a young man who watched as his father was decapitated; a former sex slave who was forced into cannibalism.
“Your tears are my tears; your pain is my pain,” Francis told them. “To every family that grieves or is displaced by the burning of villages and other war crimes, to the survivors of sexual violence and to every injured child and adult, I say: I am with you; I want to bring you God’s caress.
But after the trip was rescheduled, the Vatican had to cancel the visit to Goma due to the fighting that has forced some 5.7 million people to flee their homes, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis in Congo, where already some 26.4 million people face hunger, according to the World Food Program.
Emelda M’karhungulu, from a village near Bukavu in Congo’s South Kivu province, spoke through a translator of having been kept as a sexual slave for three months at age 16 by armed men who invaded her village in 2005. She said she was raped daily by five to 10 men who then forced their captives to eat the flesh of the men they had killed, mixed with animal meat and maize paste.
“I saw savagery: People carved up like meat in a butcher shop; women disemboweled, men decapitated,” Dhetsina reported. As his story was read to Francis, two woman stood up in front of the pope and raised into the air the stumps that remained of their mutilated arms.
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