Pope arrives in Myanmar to Catholic crowds

The pontiff’s trip has been designed to encourage their tiny Catholic communities and reach out to some of Asia’s most peripheral and poor.

But the “will he or won’t he?” issue has dominated debate before the trip, which began on Monday and ends with a youth rally in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka on 2nd December.

Upon arrival in Yangon, the pope was greeted by local Catholic officials and his motorcade passed thousands of Myanmar’s Catholics, who lined the roads, wearing traditional attire and playing music.

In Myanmar, Francis will meet separately with the country’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, its powerful military chief and Buddhist monks.

He will greet a delegation of Rohingya Muslims and meet with Bangladesh’s political and religious leadership in Dhaka.

Myanmar’s local Catholic Church has publicly urged Francis to avoid using the term “Rohingya”, which is shunned by many locally because the ethnic group is not a recognised minority in the country.

Rohingya in recent months have been subject to what the United Nations says is a campaign of “textbook ethnic cleansing” by the military in poverty-wracked Rakhine state.

Francis, though, has already prayed for “our Rohingya brothers and sisters,” and any decision to avoid the term could be viewed as a capitulation to Myanmar’s military and a stain on his legacy of standing up for the most oppressed and marginalised of society, no matter how…