Pope Francis moved by Catholics’ stories from Bosnian war

“I had a speech all ready for you but after hearing those testimonies, I feel I just have to speak off the cuff to you.”

Perhaps the most moving moment in Pope Francis's hugely symbolic one-day trip to Sarajevo on Saturday came in the Sacred Heart Cathedral late in the day. Having listened to a selection of wartime horror stories recounted by nuns and priests caught up in the conflict of 20 years ago, the visibly moved pope dropped his prepared text to tell the nuns and priests: "You must all listen to these stories. This is the historical memory of your people and a people who forget their history are a people with no future".

The pope had heard stories of how different Catholic priests and nuns were arrested, tortured, interned and physically abused by either Bosnian Muslim or Bosnian Serb forces.

One of the priests had spent 120 days in a Serb-run concentration camp where he was beaten on a daily basis, deprived of food and water and kept in filthy, unsanitary conditions.

One of the nuns had also been beaten, deprived of food and then threatened at gunpoint with rape.

All of them were called on to renounce their Christian faith in order to be released, but none of them had capitulated.

Pope Francis told them not to forget their experiences, not to "hold grudges" but rather to "create peace".

Spirit of forgiveness

Acknowledging the spirit of forgiveness in which the war witnesses told their stories, the pope said: “A few words are lodged in my heart: one of these is ‘forgiveness’. A man and a woman who consecrate their lives to the Lord, but don’t know how to forgive, are worth nothing.

“Forgiving an enemy who says something bad to you, or a sister who is jealous, isn’t difficult. But forgiving someone who kicks you and hurts you, who threatens your life with a gun, that is hard to forgive. Yet they did this, and they tell us we should do the same.”

Arguably, the most important aspect of this stop in Sarajevo was that it happened at all.

He encouraged the Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic communities of Bosnia along the difficult road to peace and reconciliation in the wake of the ethnic and religious hatred which 20 years ago cost the lives of more than 100,000 people. The pope told the 65,000 mainly Catholic faithful in the Olympic Stadium: “War means children, women and the elderly in refugee camps; it means forced displacement of peoples; it means destroyed houses, streets and factories; it means, above all, countless shattered lives. You know this well, having experienced it here: how much suffering, how much destruction, how much pain.

“Today, dear brothers and sisters, the cry of God’s people goes up once again from this city, the cry of all men and women of good will: war never again.”

‘Messenger of peace’

Back in Rome yesterday, the pope told the faithful during the Angelus prayer in St Peter’s Square that he had travelled to Bosnia as a “messenger of peace and hope”.

Sarajevo, the one-time “Jerusalem of Europe”, had become the symbol for all the destruction and pain of war.

The pope said he travelled to Sarajevo to help Bosnia down the difficult path of reconciliation and help the country reclaim its place as “an integral part of Europe”.