think of the mothers and grandmothers of this nation; they are a true driving force for the life and the families of Peru. What would Peru be like, without its mothers and grandmothers! What would our lives be like without them! Our love for Mary must help us to feel appreciation and gratitude for women, for our mothers and grandmothers, who are a bastion in the life in our cities. Almost always in silence, they carry life forward. It is the silence and strength of hope. Thank you for your witness.

A good spiritual test is to ask ourselves whether we can laugh at ourselves. Laughter saves us from the “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others”.[1] Brothers and sisters, laugh in community, and not at the community or at others! Let us be on guard against people so important that they have forgotten to smile in their lives.

An indescribable spirit of joy and hope, mixed with desolation and abandonment, is what Pope Francis encountered Saturday in the Buenos Aires neighborhood in Trujillo, in northern Peru, in a town still mourning the loss caused by the deadly floods of early 2017.

In the middle of the Peruvian jungle, where children are prostituted in bars in broad daylight and women sold to modern-day slave owners, Pope Francis laid out what amounts to a papal version of the #MeToo movement on Friday, decrying violence against women and sexual exploitation.

There’s a well-known dynamic on papal trips, in which words or gestures by a pope that may seem banal to external audiences instead strike locals as a thunderclap, because they break some domestic taboo or have clear relevance for a simmering local controversy.

This morning, Pope Francis delivered his homily to over 500,000 people in Huanchaco Beach, Trujillo, Peru. “What a beautiful question the Lord will ask us: how many tears did you dry today?” Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis on Saturday displayed yet another example of his love affair with the Virgin Mary, presiding over a Marian celebration in Peru’s “city of the eternal spring,” where popular Catholic devotion is nearly ubiquitous and people proudly display their devotion to the Mother of God.