VATICAN CITY (AP) – Pope Francis embarks on his second Asian pilgrimage next week, visiting Sri Lanka and the Philippines exactly 20 years after St. John Paul II’s record-making visit to two countries with wildly disparate Catholic populations. Francis will make headlines of his own, drawing millions of faithful in the Philippines and treading unchartered political waters following Sri Lanka’s remarkable electoral upset this week.
New Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who capitalized on former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s unpopularity among the island nation’s ethnic and religious minorities, will be on hand to welcome Francis when he arrives in the capital Colombo on Tuesday.
Francis will be bringing a message of reconciliation between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority and interfaith harmony after Sri Lanka’s quarter-century civil war ended in 2009 with the army’s violent crushing of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
It isn’t known if Francis will weigh in on Sri Lanka’s refusal to cooperate with a U.N. investigation into alleged war crimes in the final stages of the war. A 2011 U.N. report said up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians may have been killed during the offensive, and accused both sides of committing serious human rights violations.
Here are five things to look for during Francis’ trip, split between two days in Sri Lanka and three in the Philippines.