Pope warns against ‘ three temptations’ in Mexico
ECATEPEC, MEXICO Pope Francis again underscored the importance of social justice and human dignity while delivering Mass on Sunday, using his homily to denounce the “three temptations” of wealth, vanity and pride and their divisive effects on society.
The Mass, held outdoors in the Mexico City suburb of more than 1.6 million, drew what may be the largest crowds of the pope’s six-day Mexican tour.
Ecatepec is one of 11 municipalities in Mexico state where an emergency “gender alert” was issued in2015 after nearly 2,000 women were reported murdered or missing over a two- year span.
The pope did not explicitly criticize the failure of Mexico’s elected and church leaders to ensure basic rights and security for citizens — as he had in speeches Saturday. He spoke of the perils of being “a society of the few and for the few.”
He urged attendees to open their eyes “to the frequent injustices which stand in direct opposition to the dream and the plan of God,” pointing to wealth, vanity and pride as three hallmarks of individualism that “try to corrode us and tear us down.”
He described wealth as “seizing goods destined for all and using them only for me or for my people,” saying bread begotten through the toil of others, then taken from them “tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering.”
He called vanity “the pursuit of prestige based on continuous, relentless exclusion of those who are ‘ not likeme.’ ”
He called pride the worst of the three temptations. He defined it as “putting oneself on a higher level than one truly is on,” giving an example of someone who might say in a prayer, “I thank you, Lord, that you have not made me like the others.”
The pope invited attendees to “be first in all the initiatives which help make this blessed land of Mexico a land of opportunities,” so there would be “no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few.”
The pope will stay the night in Mexico City before heading to the Mexican state of Chiapas early Monday.