ROME — Pope Francis has told the president of Poland that he wants to visit Auschwitz next year when he visits the country to attend World Youth Day in Krakow.
Polish President Andrzej Duda visited Francis Monday at the Vatican to discuss the upcoming papal visit to Krakow.
World Youth Day is an international conference organized by the Catholic Church every two or three years in different countries. Last held in Rio de Janeiro in July, 2013, the next will take place July 25-31 in the Poland capital, with Francis expected to join more than 1 million young people for the last four days of the celebration.
This is the second time that Francis has expressed a desire to visit the former Nazi concentration camp, symbol of the Holocaust. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, archbishop of Krakow, also spoke of the pope’s interest during a press conference last May.
Both Dziwisz and Duda also said that the pontiff wants to include a visit to the Marian shrine of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.
As is customary, the Vatican won’t release the pope’s program until a few months before the trip.
During his visit to Rome, the Polish president gave Francis a copy of the image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, to “protect his pontificate.”
In January, as the world was commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the pope used Twitter to mark the occasion.
Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) January 27, 2015
A month later, as he was visiting the northern Italian city of Turin, he denounced the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating that Jews, Christians, gays, and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.
“The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to the concentration camps, like Auschwitz, to kill the Jews, and also the Christians, and also the Roma, also the homosexuals,” Francis said in improvised remarks to the local youth. “Tell me, why didn’t they bomb (those railroad routes)?”
If Francis does visit Auschwitz, he’d be the third pope to do so; St. John Paul II visited in 1979 and Benedict XVI in 2006.
