Pope leads huge mass in Cameroon city hit by post-vote protest deaths

DOUALA, Cameroon – Tens of thousands of people streamed towards a stadium in Cameroon’s economic capital Douala Friday for a huge, open-air mass by Pope Leo XIV, the biggest event of a visit marked by his calls for peace and spat with US President Donald Trump. Many of the faithful had travelled far or arrived the previous night to claim their spot for a chance to see the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics deliver mass. “It’s the achievement of a Christian lifetime. When I was little, I thought you couldn’t see the pope with your own two eyes,” Marguerite Tedga, 72, said after waiting all night with friends from her parish on the esplanade outside the stadium. The pope’s landmark 11-day tour of Africa has seen him abandon his previous restraint to deliver impassioned pleas for world peace — and tussle with fellow American Trump, after the US president lashed out at him for calling for an end to the war in the Middle East. “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” Leo said Thursday in a solemn speech at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in the city of Bamenda in northwestern

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