It is Francis’ 16th trip outside Italy since becoming pope in March 2013. Georgia is the 23rd and Azerbaijan the 24th country he has visited since then. He is the second pope to come here; St. John Paul II visited Georgia in 1999 and Azerbaijan in 2002.
Francis is spending two nights in Georgia, a country that fought a war with Russia in 2008 and which remains in tension with it over the disputed Ossetia region. It is a majority Christian nation. Oriental Orthodox count for 84 percent of the country’s 3.7 million population, and Muslims make up another 10 percent, while the Catholic community—with some 100,000 members—counts for less than one percent of the population.
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