The 80-year-old Argentine pontiff spoke alongside Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos, addressing political elites bitterly divided by last year's peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which ended a more than 50-year-old war. Pope Francis urged Colombians to rally behind a peace process seeking an end to Latin America's longest-running conflict and to address the inequalities that fueled it during his first full day in the South American country Thursday. He expressed hope the pontiff’s visit will inspire Colombians to take the next step and definitively put behind them the long decades of political violence that left 220,000 dead and 7 million internally displaced. On the 12-hour flight from Rome, Pope Francis told reporters that the trip was “to help Colombia go forward in its journey of peace.”

Expectations for Pope Francis’ visit are running high among Colombian Catholics.
Pope Francis arrives in Colombia for a five-day visit. In early 2016, Francis promised he would visit the South American country once a civil war peace agreement was in place.