Once “capital” becomes an “idol” and guides individuals and once “greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system”, it ruins society, Francis said.
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Although Latin American church leaders have issued apologies in the past, this one went further and was much more targeted, the Associated Press reported.
Defenders say Serra actually worked to mitigate the excesses of the Spanish forces against the Native Americans, and that he should not be judged by present-day standards.
Repeating some of the themes of his landmark encyclical Laudato Si on the environment last month, Francis said time was running out to save the planet from perhaps irreversible harm to the ecosystem. He told them the future of humanity is fundamentally not in the hands of great powers and elites but of the common people.
Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) (AFP) – Pope Francis, in a historic gesture of reconciliation, sought forgiveness Thursday from Bolivia’s predominantly indigenous inhabitants for crimes committed centuries earlier in the name of the Catholic Church. The Pope gave a speech to the deleg… But he said Francis’ apology was particularly poignant given the setting.
“We’re used to the creative originality of President Morales”, said Eugenio Coter, from the Church’s Bolivian Amazonian missionary region.
Guarani leader Celso Padilla says: “The summit is strictly controlled by people from the government”. Locals of Bolivia also chew the leaf of the said plant which for them is sacred.
He says: “There isn’t a single act that is explicitly for the indigenous, but rather they are included within encounters with social movements together with other sectors”.
The links and battles between Communism and the Catholic Church are an extremely sensitive subject in Latin America, the Pope’s home continent.
The first such meeting was held at the Vatican in October. “Do not forget your Quechua, your Aymara, your Guarani”, Francis stressed. The pope was then driven through the streets of Quito.
The Pope received the gift from Bolivian President Evo Morales on the latest stage of his South American tour.
One of the medals was named for the Rev. Luis Espinal, the Jesuit activist slain by Bolivian paramilitaries in 1980.
Francis, a fellow Jesuit, stopped his motorcade on Wednesday to pray at the site where Espinal’s body was dumped.
Francis said that in Bolivia the richness of a society is measured “in the elderly who manage to transmit their wisdom and the memory of their people to the youngest”.
Many church theologians have bitterly denounced the Marxist influences on Liberation Theology, but Francis has tried to rehabilitate the movement – without the Marxism.
The effort includes extra ambulances, helicopters and specially outfitted airplanes, as well as military hospital tents and portable bathrooms.
Paraguay’s government has declared Friday and Saturday national holidays in honor of the pope’s visit.
The pope is skipping Argentina on this visit, in part because the Vatican tries to avoid countries where a presidential election is imminent.
Nuns on their way to Pope Francis’ mass in Santa Cruz on Thursday.
The staff at the restaurant were apparently more than happy to assist the Pope.
“It is a mentality in which everything has a price, everything can be bought, everything is negotiable”, he continued.
Other critics said it was a distasteful, and possibly heretical melding of faith and ideology.
Morales’ strained relations with the Catholic Church have begun thawing under the Argentine-born pontiff’s papacy.
Francis arrived in the Andean nation late Wednesday after three days in Ecuador.
“We have huge agreements with the pope’s economic and social policies, agreements on welfare”, said Morales on Tuesday in Santa Cruz, adding that it was the first time he had felt such ideological affinity with a pontiff.
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The Pope had it his way. He was executed in Bolivia in 1967 by CIA-backed Bolivian troops.
