“Their memory, their zeal and their evangelical witness must never cease to inspire you in your pastoral action,” the Pope told the bishops, who were completing their ad limina visits to Rome.

The Pope urged the bishops to give the people of Gabon a solid formation in the faith, “to immunize them against the insidious danger of tribal and ethnic discrimination, which are the very negation of the Gospel.”

He asked them to “awaken in the laity the sense of their Christian vocation,” and to help them “resist ideologies and sects as well as the illusions of a false modernity and the mirage of material wealth.