Pope ends tour with visit to shanty town
POPE Francis has reinforced his place as spokesman for the world’s disenfranchised by visiting a slum to encourage its landless and insisting the Catholic Church be a place of welcome for all.
Francis ended his South American pilgrimage with a huge Mass and words of hope and faith for young and old in the Paraguayan capital Asuncion.
But the polit i c al , anti-capitalist message he left behind may have a more lasting punch.
On the f i nal day, Francis sought to offer a message of hope to the residents of the Banado Norte shanty-town and to an estimated one million people gathered for his farewell Mass on the same swampy field where St John Paul II proclaimed Paraguay’s first saint nearly 30 years ago.
“How much pain can be soothed, how much despair can be allayed in a place where we feel at home,” Francis said.
He drew cheers when he arrived in Banado Norte, saying he could not have left Paraguay without visiting, “without being on your land”.
Many residents of Banado Norte are squatters on municipal land who have come from rural areas where farmland has been increasingly bought up by Brazilians and multinational companies.
Residents argue they should be given titles to the land because they have worked to make it habitable with little help from the city.
“We built our neighbourhoods piece by piece, we made them liveable despite the difficulties of the terrain and public,” resident Maria Garcia told the Pope.