A million turn out to see Pope’s return on South American tour
LATIN America’s first pope arrived in the port city of Guayaquil in Ecuador yesterday for the first big event of a three-nation tour.
Pope Francis has set compassion for the weak and respect for the environment as central themes.
A crowd estimated at one million people, many singing hymns, awaited Francis on the packed dirt of Samanes Park for a late-morning mass. Many had spent the night and some had walked for miles to reach the park on the city’s northern outskirts.
The pontiff allowed several acolytes on the Tarmac to take selfies with him. He was met by mayor Jaime Negot, who gave him gold and silver keys to the city, encrusted with topaz and pearls.
Francis was headed next to the Shrine of the Divine Mercy, where 2,000 people at the gathering included child cancer patients, residents of homes for the elderly abandoned by their families and some of Guayaquil’s poorest.
After the open-air Mass, a private lunch was planned by a group of Jesuits. Its highlight was a reunion with the Rev Francisco Cortes, a priest affectionately known as “Padre Paquito,” to whom the Argentina-born pope, then the Rev Jorge Mario Bergoglio, entrusted his seminarians on study trips to Ecuador years ago.
In a recent interview, Rev Cortes couldn’t fathom that the pope remembered him, much less made a point of coming to have lunch.
“I don’t know what to ask him,” the soon-to-be 91-year-old Cortes said. “He said he wanted to see me and I’m amazed that he’s coming. For the first time, I have known a pope.”
The “pope of the poor” returned to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time as pontiff on Sunday, stressing the necessity of protecting the needy and the environment from exploitation and – in a nation whose president was booed as his vehicle followed the papal motorcade – to foster dialogue among all sectors of society.
Francis’s only other trip back to his home ground after being elected pope was in 2013, when he visited Brazil, where Portuguese is the main language.
Children in native dress greeted Francis at Mariscal Sucre airport outside Ecuador’s capital of Quito, the wind blowing off his skullcap and whipping his white cassock as he descended from the plane following a 13-hour flight from Rome.
In a speech in front of president Rafael Correa, Francis signaled key themes for the visit, which also takes him to Bolivia and later Paraguay. They were the need to care for society’s most marginal, guarantee socially responsible development and defend the Earth against profitat-all-cost development that he says harms the poor the most.
The environmental message – from a pope who last month issued a treatise staking the earth’s preservation as a core mission – is particularly relevant for Ecuador, a Pacific nation that is home to one of the world’s most species-diverse ecosystems but is also an Opec country heavily dependent on oil. High crude prices allowed Mr Correa to get take 1.3 million people out of poverty in his eight years in office.