Pope's trip to Sri Lanka and Philippines: 5 things to know

Pope Francis embarks on his second Asian pilgrimage this coming week, visiting Sri Lanka and the Philippines exactly 20 years after St John Paul II's record-making visit to two countries with wildly disparate Catholic populations. Francis will make headlines of his own, drawing millions of faithful in the Philippines and treading uncharted political waters following Sri Lanka's remarkable electoral upset this past week.
New Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who capitalised on former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's unpopularity among the island nation's ethnic and religious minorities, will be on hand to welcome Francis when he arrives in the capital, Colombo, on Tuesday.

Francis will be bringing a message of reconciliation between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority and interfaith harmony after Sri Lanka's quarter-century civil war ended in 2009 with the army's violent crushing of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
It isn't known whether Francis will weigh in on Sri Lanka's refusal to cooperate with a UN investigation into alleged war crimes in the final stages of the war. A 2011 UN report said up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians may have been killed during the offencive, and accused both sides of committing serious human rights violations.
Significantly, Francis will travel to the Tamil region of northern Sri Lanka to pray at a Christian shrine and meet with Tamil faithful. The Our Lady of Madhu shrine is revered by both Sinhalese and Tamil Catholics, providing the perfect backdrop for the pope to encourage reconciliation in a part of Sri Lanka that was devastated by the war.

"It's a very strong gesture," said the Rev Bernardo Cervellera, whose Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency AsiaNews covers the Catholic Church in Asia closely. "He is going to this area where John Paul couldn't go because of the war."

The Catholic Church considers itself uniquely poised to be a force for unity in Sri Lanka because it counts both Sinhalese and Tamils as members. They worship together, with liturgies often alternating between the two languages, said the Rev Prasad Harshan, a Sri Lankan doctoral student at Rome's Pontifical Holy Cross University.
"He's making an extra effort to go to these areas, and to see these victims," he said. "That will be a wonderful sign of solidarity."

Francis' canonisation Wednesday of Sri Lanka's first saint, the Rev Giuseppe Vaz, is another sign of unity: The 17th century missionary is credited with having revived the Catholic faith in the country amid persecution by Dutch colonial rulers, ministering to both Sinhalese and Tamil faithful.