Pope Francis will go to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan next week. He will bring a message of peace and reconciliation to these two conflict-ridden countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The pope, who is 86 years old, will fly to Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, on Tuesday. On Friday, he will go to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, where he will meet with the leaders of the Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland.

The six-day trip was supposed to happen in July 2022, but it was put off because Francis has knee problems that have forced him to use a wheelchair.

There were also worries about his planned trip to the east of DR Congo, where many armed groups, like M23, move around. M23 recently came within a few miles of Goma, the centre of business in the country.

The trip to Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province, is no longer on the new schedule. However, the pope will meet with the victims of the war while he is in Kinshasa.

It will be the Argentine pope’s 40th trip outside Argentina since he became head of the Catholic Church in 2013. It will also be his fifth trip to Africa.

Francis is scheduled to speak in public 12 times and meet with local officials, clerics, and charity groups. He will talk about education, climate change and deforestation, social and health problems, and more.

But his top priority will be to bring peace back to two developing countries torn apart by fighting. In the east of DR Congo, there has been fighting for 30 years, and violence is still going on in South Sudan after a brutal civil war.

On Wednesday, more than a million people are expected to attend an open-air mass at Kinshasa airport. Already, T-shirts and wax prints with Pope Francis’s image are selling well at market stalls.

DR Congo is a country in central Africa with about 100 million people. It is primarily Catholic and has a lot of mineral wealth, but poverty is a big problem.

Mauro Garofalo, head of international relations at the Rome-based Sant’Egidio community, told AFP, “The pope’s voice will be a huge boost for the country and a strong push for the political classes to solve the country’s problems.”

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Security will be a concern in Kinshasa, mostly because militias from the east pose a threat. Still, Matteo Bruni, a spokesman for the Vatican, told reporters on Tuesday that there was “no specific threat” against the pope.

The Allied Democratic Forces, which the Islamic State says is one of its groups and which bombed a Pentecostal church on January 15 and killed 14 people, are one of the armed groups working in the east of DR Congo.

This week, a Catholic teacher in Kinshasa named Justin-Marie Bayala told AFP, “We dare to hope that he will bring us lasting peace.”

Even though Congo has a lot of natural resources, Samuel Pommeret from the non-government organisation CCFD-Terre Solidaire said, “Congo is also a symbol of social injustice, the scandal of underdevelopment, and poverty.”

Francis will be the first pope to visit DR Congo since 1985. Pommeret said that Francis “could also deliver a message to the economic actors who benefit from these riches.”

In South Sudan, which became the world’s newest country when it broke away from Sudan in 2011, the pope will make another call for peace, this time with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields.

In 2019, the leaders of the Catholic, Anglican, and Scottish churches met with South Sudan rivals Riek Machar and Salva Kiir at the Vatican to encourage them to fix a peace deal that was signed the year before but hasn’t been kept.

At that event, Francis shocked everyone when he kissed the feet of the two men accused of war crimes.

“This is a very important element in the South Sudanese crisis — the joint work of the Christian churches and denominations can represent an antidote to the ethnicism and political rivalry,” Garofalo said.

After South Sudan gained its independence, there was a brutal five-year civil war between President Kiir’s forces and those of his deputy, Machar. Nearly 400,000 people died in this war.

Even though there was a peace deal in 2018, there are still short bursts of violence between the government and the opposition. Also, the fighting between different ethnic groups in lawless parts of the country has a terrible effect on civilians.