He called for an end to the bloodshed.. Pope Francesco concludes his visit to southern Sudan in an open air mass

Pope Francis concluded his visit to South Sudan - today, Sunday - and urged people to immunize themselves against the "poison of hate" to achieve peace and prosperity after years of bloody ethnic conflicts.

The Pope (who is 86 years old) focused on his trip to the youngest country in the world on two important topics, which are reconciliation and mutual forgiveness for the mistakes of the past.

Francesco appealed to a crowd of nearly 70,000 to avoid the "blind fury of violence".

He urged the people to "build good human relations as a means of curbing the corruption of evil, the disease of division, the filth of fraudulent business dealings, and the plague of injustice."

Francesco made another plea for an end to the tribalism, financial irregularities, and political nepotism that are at the root of many of the country's problems.

The Pope has been interested in South Sudan affairs for a long time.

And in 2019, he knelt to kiss the feet of the country's former warring leaders during a meeting in the Vatican.

Francesco was accompanied on his trip by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, leader of the global Anglican community, and Ian Greenshields, coordinator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

The pope's previous stop was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to Africa's largest Catholic community, where he held a mass attended by a million people and heard harrowing stories from people affected by war in the eastern part of the country.

Two years after independence, South Sudan descended into civil war that left 400,000 dead.

Despite the peace agreement concluded in 2018 between the two main parties to the conflict, waves of violence continued to kill and displace large numbers of civilians.

South Sudan has some of the largest crude oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, but a United Nations report in 2021 said that the country's leaders had diverted "enormous amounts of money and other wealth" from coffers and public resources.

The government rejected the UN report and denied accusations of widespread corruption.