Pope Leo visits Angola’s diamond-rich northeast

Luanda: Pope Leo XIV heads to Angola’s remote and diamond-rich northeast on Monday in the latest stop on an Africa tour during which he has spoken out against the country’s glaring poverty.

On the eighth day of a trip to four African nations, Leo will fly to the town of Saurimo, 800 kilometres east of the capital Luanda.

Angola is one of Africa’s top producers of crude oil and diamonds, but around a third of its population live below the World Bank poverty line.

Saurimo is the capital of the historically marginalised Lunda Sul province and close to Angola’s largest diamond mine, Catoca, which extracts around 75 percent of the country’s diamonds.

Leo will hold an open-air mid-morning mass expected to draw around 30,000 people.

Afterwards he is due to visit a home for the elderly, underscoring the Catholic Church’s support for the province’s poor infrastructure and services.

Despite its mineral wealth, Lunda Sul suffers from poverty, with mining also blamed for environmental damage.

In his first event after arriving in oil-rich Angola on Saturday, the pope spoke out against the harm caused by rampant exploitation of natural resources, which has been a theme of his tour of the continent.

“How much suffering, how many deaths, how many social and environmental disasters are caused by this logic of exploitation,” he said in an address to government officials including President Joao Lourenco.

The pope is due later Monday to meet clergy to discuss challenges facing the church in Angola, including a lack of resources and the growing influence of evangelicism.

After John Paul II in 1992 and Benedict XVI in 2009, Leo XIV is the third pope to visit this country, which was badly battered in a 27-year civil war that erupted after independence from Portugal in 1975.

At a mass Sunday attended by 100,000 people, the 70-year-old pontiff called for Angola to overcome divisions of the past and create a future where “the scourge of corruption will be healed by a new culture of justice and sharing.”

Leo’s tour of Africa - an 18,000-kilometre journey over 11 days - began in Algeria a week ago and continued to Cameroon. It winds up in Equatorial Guinea over April 21-23.