The Pope in Africa

Any visit to Sudan, no matter how brief, would lend the Vatican’s imprimatur to a government “dripping with the blood of Christians.” That was the warning of a Sudanese bishop who conferred with John Paul II in Uganda on the Pope’s 10th African tour, left. Never a man for circumvention, the Pope thanked his bishop for the advice — and then headed straight for Khartoum, where he implored a regime accused of widespread religious persecution to end its “terrible harvest of suffering.” In the past decade, hundreds of thousands have died in a civil war between Sudan’s Muslim government in the north and the animist and Christian black societies in the south.