Pope Francis visits ‘the periphery of the peripheries’ in Vanimo, Papua New Guinea
Gerard O´Connell. América Magazine
Pope Francis was greeted Sunday afternoon by a crowd of 20,000 people in what he had called “the periphery of the peripheries,” the coastal city of Vanimo in Papua New Guinea. Located in the northwest of the country, Vanimo sits near the border with Indonesia and on the edge of a tropical rain forest.
The pope came to visit and encourage the small Catholic community in Vanimo and to meet the Argentine missionary priests and nuns working there, as he had promised he would some years ago. He arrived on a C-130 Royal Australian Air Force plane at 3:15 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 8, from Port Moresby, the nation’s capital.