Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis will visit the Greek island of Lesvos (Mytilene), on Saturday April 16th.
The two religious leaders, together with Archbishop of Athens and All Greece Ieronymos, will visit the island, in an effort to raise the awareness of the international public opinion on the refugee issue.
Archbishop Ieronymos is expected to arrive on the island on Friday. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will arrive also on Friday, at 8 pm. Pope Francis will be received on Saturday, at about 10.15 am, by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop Ieronymos and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
They will all together visit the hot spot at Moria where they will meet with refugees and migrants and sign an international declaration on the refugee crisis.
Catholics Community of Lesvos
According to the Catholic Diocese of Chios (Lesvos – Samos), the Pope will meet with the Catholics Community of Lesvos and other Catholics on the island. The Pope will hold ten-minute meetings with Orthodox bishops and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and approximately at 3 pm they will all depart from Lesvos.
Ieronymos will arrive on the eastern Aegean island a day earlier in order to conduct a memorial service for the late Orthodox priest Father Efstratios Dimou, or Papa Stratis as he was known, who set up a charity on the island to provide help to migrants.
After that, the archbishop will inaugurate a social grocery store created in Papa Stratis’s memory. The priest died on Lesvos last September.
200 journalists to cover Pope’s visit to Lesvos
On Saturday, international television channels will broadcast live the visit of Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Hieronymus to millions of Christians all over the world. CNN, BBC and RAI are working together with Greece’s state broadcaster ERT to arrange the last details so as to cover this important event.
Archbishop Hieronymus wanted to put a spotlight on refugee issue at international level. “Hope this is not a show-off trip”, he said. “Let it be a plain trip. The act itself is a message,” he added.
The visit of Pope Francis will last four hours, while two hundred journalists from all over the world have asked to cover the event and 53 foreign journalists will accompany Pope through his visit.
Catholic aid workers: Pope’s trip to Greece comes at a critical time
Pope Francis’s trip to Lesvos comes at a frightening and critical time for tens of thousands of refugees, according to members of Catholic aid agencies in Greece.
Maristella Tsamatropoulou, spokesperson for Caritas Hellas, the Catholic charity in Greece, said when rumours started swirling that Pope Francis would join Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople on a visit to refugees, “we believed it immediately because our Pope is spontaneous; he’s a force of nature.”
Last October, when several thousand refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries were passing through Greece on their way to other parts of Europe, Caritas Hellas had five paid employees.
Now the number of refugees and migrants has grown and the borders with other European countries have been closed to them. In response, the paid staff at the Caritas central office in Athens has grown to 15 people and there are 40 other employees around the country, including in Lesvos.
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