Pope Francis, on the last day of his trip to Romania, on Sunday asked for forgiveness on behalf of his church for the suffering endured by the Roma people, saying his heart was “weighed down by the many experiences of discrimination, segregation and mistreatment” they have experienced.

The pope offered the apology at a newly consecrated church in a poor neighborhood of Blaj, a city in Transylvania, where a priest of Roma ethnicity welcomed him “to the periphery of the peripheries.”

“History tells us that Christians too, including Catholics, are not strangers to such evil,” Francis said. “I would like to ask your forgiveness for this. I ask forgiveness in the name of the church and of the Lord and I ask forgiveness of you, for all those times in history when we have discriminated, mistreated or looked askance at you.”

This was his first trip to Romania and the first by a pontiff since John Paul II visited 20 years ago and Francis sought to mend relations between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. He also took the opportunity to advocate for millions of Romanian emigrants, to hearten the country’s small Catholic population and to again position himself as a counterbalance to the tip toward nationalism around the world.

That effort became clear in a news conference on the flight back to Rome, when he was asked by reporters about the European parliamentary elections last week in which nationalists, including Italy’s Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party, scored large gains in the heart of Western Europe.

Francis implored Catholics to pray for the future of European unity, and for nonbelievers to desire it “from the bottom of your hearts.”

“If Europe does not look carefully to future challenges, Europe will dry up,” he warned, saying that the European Union “has aged” and that “someone could ask under their breath ‘Is this perhaps the end of a 70-year adventure?’”

The pope said, “Europe is not being attacked by cannons or bombs in this moment but by ideologies,” but he recalled the blood baths of World Wars I and II and urged that the world “not return to this.”

The pope has consistently warned against the increasing fear-mongering and blaming of migrants like the Roma, who are often called Gypsies by their detractors, among them Salvini. He has formed alliances with traditionalists in the Vatican who applaud his antagonism to Muslim migrants and his laments about the erosion of the church’s influence on social issues.

“Tradition is the guarantee of the future and not the container of the ashes,” the pope said. He said that “the tradition of the church is always in movement” and that “the nostalgia of the fundamentalists is to return to the ashes.”

Earlier in the day, before an enormous crowd in a field outside Blaj, Francis focused on the oppression that Catholics themselves endured under communism.

Presiding over the beatification of seven bishops who died decades ago under Romania’s communist government, Francis warned that “today, too, we witness the appearance of new ideologies that quietly attempt to assert themselves and to uproot our peoples from their richest cultural and religious traditions.”

The communist regime outlawed the Greek Catholic Church and forced Greek Catholics to join the Orthodox Church. Many were imprisoned for refusing to do so, including the seven bishops Valeriu Traian Frentiu, Vasile Aftenie, Ioan Suciu, Tit Liviu Chinezu, Ioan Balan, Alessandru Rusu and Iuliu Hossu beatified on Sunday, who were arrested and jailed between 1950 and 1970.

Communists also seized Catholic property and gave it to the Orthodox Church, which has yet to return much of it, creating lingering tensions even decades after the fall of communism.

But during his visit, Francis, who presided Sunday over an Eastern-rite liturgy for the first time as pope, repeatedly urged unity and the rejection of “new ideologies.”

Florin Botonogu, president of the Policy Center for Roma and Minorities, speaking from an office in Bucharest, said he hoped attention from the pope would generate momentum to support Roma.

“We need this support, especially when the rightist movement is growing in Europe,” he said, noting the recent violence and discrimination against Roma, particularly in Italy. “It’s important that the pope says, ‘Look, this issue is important to me.’”

There are about 12 million Roma in Europe “We are the migrants of Europe, in Europe,” Draghici said and advocates have expressed concern about the rise in nationalism across the Continent.

In March, Roma were attacked on the streets of Paris after false rumors spread on social media and messaging apps about attempted child abductions.

The roughly 200,000 Roma in Italy have also come under attack. While some Roma have roots in the country going back to the Middle Ages, others came to Italy from the former Yugoslavia to escape war in the 1990s. Many are Italian citizens.