A jubilant crowd gathered in stifling heat Friday for a giant open-air mass by Pope Leo XIV at a stadium in Cameroon’s economic capital Douala, the biggest event of a visit marked by his calls for peace and spat with US President Donald Trump.
More than 120,000 people attended the celebration, the Vatican said, citing local authorities, with some travelling long distances or arriving the previous night for a chance to see the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
Waving “branches of peace” and Vatican flags, to lively choral music punctuated by percussion, the joyful crowd chanted “Long live the pope!” as Leo arrived in a popemobile at the esplanade outside the Japoma Stadium.
“It’s the achievement of a Christian lifetime. When I was little, I thought you couldn’t see the pope with your own two eyes,” Marguerite Tedga, 72, said after waiting all night with friends from her parish.
The pope’s landmark 11-day tour of Africa has seen him abandon his previous restraint to deliver impassioned pleas for world peace — and tussle with fellow American Trump, after the US president lashed out at him for calling for an end to the war in the Middle East.
“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” Leo said Thursday in a solemn speech in the city of Bamenda in northwestern Cameroon, the epicentre of a nearly decade-long separatist insurgency that has killed thousands of people.
Trump later said the pope could say what he liked, but needed to understand the realities of a “nasty world”.
Far from the Trump broadsides, Leo has been greeted by adoring, singing-and-dancing crowds wherever he goes in Cameroon.
“Having seen the Pope gives me a feeling of deliverance. I was deeply moved by his message, and what I remember most is his call for sharing,” Edith Fifi, a 25-year-old beautician, said.
But some Cameroonian Catholics had feared that Leo’s visit could help President Paul Biya, who has ruled with an iron fist since 1982, burnish his image.
Douala, one of central Africa’s largest ports, was among the cities to see a violent crackdown on demonstrations against the re-election in October of a man who at the age of 93 is already the world’s oldest head of state.
Witnesses have reported that the security forces fired live rounds into the crowds. The authorities have acknowledged dozens of deaths, without giving a precise toll.
In his homily in Doula, delivered in French — the country is mostly French-speaking — the pope urged Cameroonians to be “protagonists of the future” and to “reject every form of abuse or violence”.
Afterwards, he was to visit Saint Paul’s Catholic hospital in the city before returning to the capital Yaounde, to address university students and teachers.
