Pope Champions Refugees in Visit to Bulgaria, a Country Hostile to Them

SOFIA, Bulgaria — Pope Francis began his first visit to Bulgaria on Sunday by pushing to mend the 1,000-year schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, supporting the small local Catholic population and championing the refugees who he believes have been exploited by fear-mongering European nationalists.

After a brief meeting Sunday morning with President Rumen Radev in the capital, Sofia, Francis noted that Bulgaria was “familiar with the drama of emigration.” The country is losing its youth and educated classes to opportunities abroad and has, according to the United Nations, the fastest-shrinking population in the world.

“I respectfully suggest,” Francis said, “that you not close your eyes, your hearts or your hands, in accordance with your best tradition, to those who knock at your door.”

Bulgaria, the poorest country in the European Union, has seen only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to get to Western Europe through the Balkans: a peak of about 20,000 asylum seekers in 2015, according to the government. Bulgaria has built a fence along its border with Turkey. And groups of so-called vigilante refugee hunters started to patrol the border in 2016 to prevent an influx of asylum seekers.

Francis is the second pope to visit Bulgaria, after Pope John Paul II made a trip in 2002. He is to head on Monday to North Macedonia, which recently changed its name after a long and acrimonious dispute with Greece. The visits to the Balkan nations represent a pivot for Francis from the Muslim world, which has occupied most of his travel schedule so far this year, including trips to the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.

Francis received a somewhat chilly reception from spiritual leaders in the East European countries. In Bulgaria, Orthodox leaders ordered their priests to refrain from worshiping with the pope and made it clear that the invitation had come from the Bulgarian government, not from the church.

The Bulgarian church’s Holy Synod issued a statement before the visit to emphasize that “any form of shared liturgical or prayer service, as well as wearing of liturgical garments, is unacceptable to us as the holy canons do not allow this.”

Francis met with the Patriarch Neophyte, the head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, at St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia on Sunday and spoke privately with him for about a half an hour.

A crowd greeted Francis, chanting his name and “long live the pope” as he traveled to the meeting.

There are about 58,000 Roman Catholics in Bulgaria, a country of more than seven million people. North Macedonia, with a population of around two million, has 15,000 Catholics. The Orthodox Church split from Rome in 1054 over theological and political disputes, and despite significant improvements in relations after the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which recognized the validity of Eastern sacraments, a full reconciliation has not occurred.

Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council in 1959, had deep experience in Bulgaria, serving as the apostolic delegate there for a decade when he was known as Archbishop Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. In Bulgaria, he is often called “the Bulgarian pope.”

Francis paid tribute on Sunday to John XXIII, saying that the pontiff, who was canonized in 2014, had “worked tirelessly to promote fraternal cooperation between all Christians” and to support “the development of ecumenical relationships.” Francis recalled that John XXIII once said that “wherever he would go, his house would always be open to everyone, Catholic or Orthodox alike, who came as a brother or sister from Bulgaria.”

Another Orthodox prelate, the Metropolitan Anthony of Western and Central Europe, greeted the pope warmly before his meeting with Patriarch Neophyte. Afterward, Francis walked to the cathedral, where he sat on a red velvet armchair bordered in gold and prayed alone, often with his hands covering his face, in front of an image of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the cathedral.

He then left the church and gave a speech to a crowd of a few thousand on brotherhood between the churches, noting that “Bulgaria, which, while an Orthodox country, is a crossroads where various religious expressions encounter one another and engage in dialogue.”

He added, “I have had the joy of greeting and embracing my brother, His Holiness Patriarch Neophyte.”

The symbolism was one of reconciliation, but on an issue dear to Francis’ heart; the two Christian spiritual leaders have often found themselves at odds.

In 2015, at the peak of the refugee crisis, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church issued a statement, signed by Patriarch Neophyte, urging the government not to allow more refugees into the country. His church described the migration as an “invasion.” While the clergy expressed compassion for the migrants already in the country, it said that “Bulgarian Orthodox people would be the ones to not pay the price of our disappearing as a state.”

Last year, Bulgaria declined to join the United Nations global pact on migration, a nonbinding agreement aiming to regulate treatment of migrants worldwide — one strongly supported by Francis.

Francis is expected to visit a refugee camp on the outskirts of Sofia on Monday before heading to North Macedonia, the home of Mother Teresa. The camp houses about 65 asylum seekers, most of them from Iraq and Syria — a far cry from its swelling numbers during the peak of the migrant crisis.

Zahra, a 17-year-old from Afghanistan, recalled last week how crowded Voenna Rampa, another camp in Sofia, was three years ago when her family first arrived in Bulgaria.

“The camp was so packed with people that we had to share a very small room with another family,” she said, speaking fluent Bulgarian.

The vast majority of the migrants have continued on to Western Europe after the country adopted a harder line against migrants.

Last week, Lauin Sadek, a 23-year-old Iraqi Kurd, returned from work after taking a route through an underpass marred with swastikas and a blue scrawl reading “Refugees Out,” and past the spot where three Eritrean refugees were beaten last year.

He said he feared deportation and hoped to tell Francis about the challenges that asylum seekers like him face. “I would like to give him a note with my personal story,” he said.