Pope Francis has postponed his trip to Africa, slated for July 2 to 7.
The Director of the Holy See Press office in the Vatican, Matteo Bruni, who made the announcement in a statement, said the Pope cancelled the trip due to knee pain.
Bruni further said a new date for the Pope’s trip would be announced later.
The statement read, “The Holy Father, accepting the request of his doctors and in order not to compromise the results of the knee therapies still underway, is forced to postpone his trip to a later date to be determined,”
The announcement comes a few days after the Vatican had released a detailed programme outline for the six-day trip to Kinshasa, Goma and Juba.
It would be recalled that In early May, Lebanon had already announced the postponement of the pope’s visit to the country scheduled for June, citing “health reasons”.
Suffering from severe pain in his right knee, the Argentine pontiff has been in a wheelchair since the beginning of May and has announced that he will have to undergo infiltrations, injections of corticoid-based anti-inflammatory drugs.
“I’ve been in this condition for a while now, I can’t walk anymore,” he told the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera in May, after being forced to cancel several meetings scheduled on his agenda.
