SEOUL, South Korea — Pope Francis wrapped up his five-day visit to South Korea on Monday with calls for forgiveness and renewed dialogue on the divided Korean Peninsula and for more humanitarian aid for North Korea.
“Let us pray, then, for the emergence of new opportunities for dialogue, encounter and the resolution of differences, for continued generosity in providing humanitarian assistance to those in need, and for an ever greater recognition that all Koreans are brothers and sisters, members of one family, one people,” the pope said during a Mass in Myeongdong Cathedral, the center of South Korean Catholicism. The Mass was attended by President Park Geun-hye.
The South Korean government has maintained that those sanctions, including the suspension of inter-Korean trade, will stay until North Korea apologizes for the sinking, which killed 46 sailors. The North has denied involvement.
On Monday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that the country would take an “unpredictable, high-level” counteraction against the joint annual military drill that the United States and South Korea had begun earlier in the day. Although the two allies called their exercise defensive in nature, the North called it a rehearsal for nuclear war.
Speaking at the same altar from which Korean Catholic leaders of the past often influenced government policy with appeals for tolerance and criticism of dictatorships, Pope Francis ended his visit with an impassioned plea for forgiveness and reconciliation with North Korea.
“Peter asks the Lord: ‘If my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ To which the Lord replies: ‘Not seven times, I tell you, but 70 times seven,’ ” the pope said. “Unless we are prepared to do this, how can we honestly pray for peace and reconciliation?”
“In telling us to forgive our brothers unreservedly,” Francis said in reference to Jesus, “he is asking us to do something utterly radical.”
Such a message usually is not received very well by right-wing Protestants in South Korea, some of whom have protested the pope’s visit. Although Protestant groups have led efforts to ship aid to North Korea, they also constitute the most vocal activists against the Communist government in Pyongyang. During outdoor rallies, they have burned in effigy its leader, Kim Jong-un, and they have released large balloons that were timed to distribute anti-Kim leaflets over the isolated North. Many South Korean Protestant missionaries work undercover in northeastern China, smuggling North Koreans to the South and sneaking Bibles into the North.
South Korea’s proposal last week requested high-level government talks with the North like the ones held in February, when the rival governments arranged a round of reunions of aging relatives who had been separated in the early 1950s by the Korean War.
Such reunions are a highly emotional issue on the divided peninsula, and South Korea had hoped to arrange a new round in time for the traditional family gatherings of Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving on Sept. 8. So far, North Korea has not responded to the overture, instead reiterating its demand for the lifting of sanctions.
“If the North has a demand, it must first come to the table of dialogue,” the South’s Unification Ministry said Monday in a statement. “If the North shows a responsible attitude, we are ready to discuss anything for the improvement of South-North relations.”
The South Korean Catholic Church had asked the North to send a delegation to the pope’s Mass for peace and reconciliation on Monday, but the North rejected the offer. North Korea tolerates only government-approved churches and temples, which are widely dismissed as an attempt to hide state persecution of religious worshipers.
The separated families have long served as a symbol of the torturous modern history of Korea, which the pope on Monday called “a people dispersed by disaster and division.”
At the beginning of the Mass, Francis greeted and consoled seven women who have said they were forced or deceived into working at front-line brothels for Japan’s army during World War II. Historians estimate that Japan mobilized as many as 200,000 such women across Asia, many of them from Korea, a Japanese colony at the time.
The seven women, in their 80s and 90s, are among 55 surviving “comfort women,” who have demanded an apology from Japan and compensation for sexual slavery. They have said that they were sometimes violated by dozens of Japanese soldiers a day. Some of the women have held weekly demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul for more than 20 years. The South Korean government supports the women’s demands, while Tokyo has insisted that the matter was settled under a 1965 treaty that re-established diplomatic ties between the two nations.
Invited to sit in the front row during the Mass, the seven women delivered the pope a gift: a painting by a former sex slave who died in 2004. The work, showing a downcast Korean girl in a traditional white-and-black dress with contrasting pink flowers, was titled “A Flower That Did Not Blossom.” Many of those who survived sexual slavery stayed unmarried or hid their wartime backgrounds because of the shame.
