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.
Governments, private entities and church communities have an obligation to be transparent to protect their people and land from the scourge of corruption, Pope Francis said.
Encouraging the people of one of Peru’s most battered cities, Pope Francis said the Gospel message can give Christians strength and hope to navigate amid life’s storms.
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.
Black market mining has become a danger that is destroying people’s lives; forests and rivers are being destroyed, with all the richness they possess. This whole process of degradation brings with it and encourages organizations operating outside of legal structures; these debase so many of our brothers and sisters by subjecting them to human trafficking (a new form of slavery), irregular employment and crime… and to other evils that gravely affect their dignity and, at the same time, the dignity of the nation.
I know that sometimes, at night, some of you feel sad. I know that you miss your father and mother who are not here, and I know too that sometimes you feel very hurt. Forgive us those times when we adults have not cared for you, and when we did not give you the importance you deserve.
In the middle of Peru’s Amazon jungle, Pope Francis on Friday delivered what could be considered a “seamless garment” speech – stressing ecology and issuing a strong appeal for protection of the Amazon region, which he said is not an “inexhaustible source of resources,” while also insisting that human life has equal, if not greater, value.
