‘Build Peace and Bridges’, Pope Francis Urges Bulgarians

After a tightly-packed three-day programme, Pope Francis left Bulgaria on Tuesday morning with a call for the country to continue "building peace and bridges" with its neighbours.

"Keep building peace, sow goodness," the pontiff told Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, who saw him off as he departed for North Macedonia for the next leg of his Balkan trip.

The Pope's visit to Bulgaria, which included two large-scale prayer events in central Sofia, a detour to a refugee reception centre and a mass communion in the Catholic town of Rakovski, near Plovdiv, went smoothly and he was positively received by both Roman Catholics and Orthodox worshippers.

According to an opinion survey conducted by the Trend agency conducted before the pontiff's visit, 57 per cent of Bulgarians said they are positively inclined towards Pope Francis, while only eight per cent said they have a negative attitude towards him.

However, some of the Pope's comments and actions were not well-received by conservative members of the Bulgarian Orthodox clergy, right-wing politicians and their supporters on social media.

Pope Francis's pro-migrant comments, made while meeting President Rumen Radev on Sunday, as well as his visit to the refugee camp in Vrazhdebna on the outskirts of the Bulgarian capital, sparked anger from the Ataka ('Attack') and Volya ('Will') populist far-right parties.

"I do not agree with the Pope's call to welcome all migrants… not all of them come with good intentions," Volya's leader Veselin Mareshki said in a statement.

After receiving a cool welcome from the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which forbade its clerics to join the pontiff in his Monday evening 'Prayer for Peace' alongside representatives of six other faiths in the...