MANILA, Philippines – Reaching out to the world’s “peripheries,” Pope Francis wants to visit areas hit by Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) and the magnitude-7.2 Visayas earthquake as a “defining character” of his possible Philippine trip.

“I think one purpose of the visit of the Holy Father is to come close to the people who suffered from the recent typhoon and the earthquake,” Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle said in an interview with the Catholic News Service (CNS), published on May 22.

“We will see how that could be done. But he, I think, would want that to be a defining character of his trip,” Tagle said in the interview while he was in the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

Tagle added, “I have said his coming will be stronger than the typhoon, but in a positive way.”

The Vatican confirmed that a visit by the Pope to the Philippines in January or February 2015 is “under study,” CNS earlier reported.

Tagle ‘confident’ Pope will come

“The Vatican has not yet announced the dates and the specific itinerary that the pope will observe, but I am confident it will happen early next year,” Tagle told CNS.

Francis has repeatedly prayed for disaster survivors in the Philippines.

In October 2013, shortly after a magnitude-7.2 earthquake struck the Visayas, he said, “I want to express my closeness to the people of the Philippines who have been struck by a strong earthquake, and I invite you to pray for that dear nation, which in recent days has suffered different calamities.”

He also included Yolanda survivors in his Christmas message in December 2013. “Lord of heaven and earth, look upon our planet, frequently exploited by human greed and rapacity. Help and protect all the victims of natural disasters, especially the beloved people of the Philippines gravely affected by the recent typhoon,” he said.

The Pope, after all, had said the Church “is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery.” – Rappler.com