Pope urges post-war healing in Sri Lanka during temple visit

Pope Francis paid a surprise visit to a Buddhist temple yesterday, capping a trip to Sri Lanka where he told huge crowds that religions must unite to heal the country's war wounds.

The only other visit by a pope to a Buddhist temple was made by Pope John Paul during a trip to Thailand in 1984.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope briefly stopped at Colombo's Mahabodhi temple to meet Banagila Upatissa, a Buddhist leader who had invited him when they met on Tuesday.

Lombardi said that in honour of the occasion, the monks opened a container holding Buddhist relics that is normally unsealed only once a year.

The pope, who has made inter-religious dialogue a plank of his papacy, has already been to mosques during trips to Istanbul and Jerusalem.

During his two-day trip to Sri Lanka – which is about 70 percent Buddhist, 13 percent Hindu, 10 percent Muslim and 7 percent Catholic – the pope has stressed the role of religion to help reconciliation after the 26-year civil war that ended in 2009 and killed up to 100,000 people.

Earlier, Francis gave Sri Lanka its first saint at a seafront Mass for more half a million people in Colombo, calling 17th-century missionary Joseph Vaz a model of reconciliation.

He held up Vaz as an example of tolerance as Sri Lanka recovers from the war between mainly Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils.

Vaz was born in 1651 in India's Goa, then a Portuguese colony. He travelled south at the age of 36, dressed as a beggar after hearing about the persecution of Catholics by the Dutch. He worked for years under the protection of a Buddhist king.

The pope flew to Madhu, in the north, to preach forgiveness for the “evil” committed in the war and visit a Catholic shrine that was shelled. It was the first visit by a pope to the predominantly Hindu region that contains a large Catholic minority and was the scene of fierce fighting between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil Tiger rebels seeking a separate homeland. – Reuters