Bratislava: Pope Francis warned too much focus on individual rights and cultural wars at the expense of mutual goodness on Monday during a visit to Slovakia amid increasing nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Eastern Europe.
Francis aged 84 years made his first trip since undergoing intestinal surgery in July and seemed to be in good condition.
Asked by a reporter on Monday how he feels, he jokes: “Still alive.” On the first Pontifical visit to Slovakia since 2003, Francis returned to the theme he had touched during a stopover on Sunday in Hungary about how the nations had to avoid the egosis mentality, when he remembered the communist past in the region.
“In these countries, until a few decades, a single thought system (communism) hampered freedom.
Today another single thought system empties the freedom of meaning, reducing progress for profit and rights for individual needs,” said Francis.
Overcoming Slovake President Zuzana Caputova, another official, and diplomat in the Presidential Palace Gardens, Pope added: “Brotherhood is needed for the increasingly urgent integration (Europe) process.” Slovakia, part of Czechoslovakia during the Communist, securing its independence from Prague in 1993.
Slovak and the wider Eastern European economy have boomed but their integration to the European Union also coincides with the nationalist reaction to the increase in illegal immigration, often involving Muslims from the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Eastern dissatisfaction Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, has been in Loggerhead with the EU for their hard-line attitudes in migration and for their judicial reform and curbing media freedom.
In September, Brussels told Poland his challenge for the UE Law on the National Law holding a 57 billion euro release in recovery funds to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic effect.
Francis specifically said that the UE recovery plan on Monday, said people “looked forward to expectations for economic progress” were intended to support.
Pope often calls for European solutions to the migrant crisis and has criticized the government who tried, such as Hungary, to overcome it with unilateral or isolationist actions.
In Budapest on Sunday, in a clear response to the Prime Minister of Nationalists Viktor Orban that Muslim immigration can destroy his inheritance, he preserves a deep-rooted Christian inheritance does not exclude the attitude that needs to be lacquered.
“Our Christian way to see other people refuse to see them as a burden or problem, but more as brothers and sisters to be helped and protected,” he said on Monday.
From the Presidential Palace, Francis went to a meeting with the bishops and other Slovak religious leaders, which were about two Rome Catholic-thirds.
Then he will visit a shelter for the poor and to meet with representatives of the Slovak Jewish community.
He returned to Rome on Wednesday morning.