Pope Francis held the first mass of his eight-day Latin American trip with more than 500,000 people Monday in the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil.
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The pope will visit Bolivia on Wednesday before going to Paraguay on Friday.
©2015 by The Associated Press.
“I’ve come to this spiritual encounter to ask the pope to heal me because I have cancer”, said Franklin Borbor, 48, who despite his illness traveled more than five hours to find his place in the park.
“The time is coming when we will taste love daily, when our children will come to appreciate the home we share, and our elderly will be present each day in the joys of life”, the Pope said. “For the first time, I have known a pope”.
His last visit to South America was a triumphant trip to Brazil in 2013 that culminated with three million people gathering in Rio de Janeiro along Copacabana beach for a mass at the end of a Catholic youth festival.
(AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa). Pope Francis waves to the crowd as he rides aboard the Popemobile in streets of Quito, Ecuador, Sunday, July 5, 2015.
The now almost 91-year-old priest must have made a strong impression with his work at the Colegio Javier seminary mentoring young men sent to him by the future pontiff, because he is the only person with whom Francis is meeting privately on his visit to Ecuador.
On Monday, young people with guitars and drums serenaded the pope as he left the Papal Nunciature’s residence in Quito en route to the airport outside the city. He was never a pushover with students, he said. Now the language of course, Spanish, is widely spoken in South America and it’s the native language of Pope Francis.
It is also the departure point for the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin began to formulate his ideas on evolution.
The pope will meet Tuesday with the country’s bishops and with members of civil society and will also celebrate an outdoor Mass expected to attract crowds in the millions.
But now that they’ve fallen, the generous social safety net Correa has woven is threatened.
Organizers have called for a pause in ongoing protests over tax changes and “state authoritarianism” during the pope’s visit.
When he emerged from the plane, a breeze whipped off his white zucchetto cap and swirled his robes, but the affable 78-year-old took it in his stride, smiling and laughing as he walked down steps to an embrace from President Rafael Correa.
Correa also has angered environmentalists and the nation’s main indigenous group, CONAIE, by moving forward with oil drilling and mining projects in pristine Amazon forests.
The Pope has requested to chew cocoa leaves while in Bolivia, according to Bolivian Culture Minister Marko Machicao.
A self-proclaimed “Mr. Nobody” soon will be sharing the spotlight with one of the world’s most famous people.
Francis, straying from his prepared remarks, thanked Correa for his “consonance of thought”. “Will you promise me that?”, the pontiff asked.
A Vatican spokesman tried to get ahead of any spin about what Francis may have had in mind when he mentioned threats. People waved handkerchiefs and Vatican flags.
In his encyclical, the pope demanded swift action to save the planet from ruin and urged leaders to hear “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”, whom he said were most affected by climate change.
“Francis has given us back hope in our families, in those we love the most, the nucleus of society”, she said.
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Francis, already seen by many as “the pope of the poor”, chose to visit Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay specifically because they are among the poorest and most marginal nations of a region that claims 40 percent of the world’s Catholics.
