A young man leaning up against the metal barrier with his wife on the Juarez side of the Rio Grande a few hours before Pope Francis made this silent prayer for migrants, Francisco Javier Favala, 26, is precisely the kind of individual “story” Pope Francis would like them to hear.
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Bishop Daniel Flores, who has been traveling with Francis during his five-day trip in Mexico, said the central themes of the pope’s sermon and papacy are the same: a call to conversion.
US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is “not Christian” because of his views on immigration, Pope Francis said on his way back to Rome from Mexico. For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.
Tens of thousands of Catholics, mainly from the US, flocked to see the pope in Juarez, which is also famous for being the birthplace of the Margarita cocktail.
Against this backdrop he denounced immigration policies which force many into the hands of drug gangs and people smugglers and he remembered the plight of migrants everywhere. I think he doesn’t understand the problems our country has. “… And we must make sure that these situations do not happen again”.
Pope Francis stopped short of calling outright for the U.S. to open its borders, but he urged recognition that the multitudes fleeing gangland killings and extortion in their homelands are victims.
The South Carolina primary is now just two days away, and the Republican presidential candidates are hoping to sway votes away from frontrunner Donald Trump.
“It’s a message directed at everyone, from the authorities to ourselves”, said Natalia Herrera Miranda, a Juarez resident who was at the Mass. “And Americans as well, so that they take immigrants in and see them for what they are – people just like everyone else”.
Francis, the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, had wanted to cross the border in solidarity with other migrants when he visited the USA last fall.
Look at Francis’ role in encouraging renewed relations between the United States and Cuba, for example, the spokesman said, adding that the pope has also encouraged Europeans to care for the refugees at their borders.
The Mass was the final major event of the Papal visit to Mexico.
“In this Year of Mercy, with you here, I beg for God’s mercy; with you I wish to plead for the gift of tears, the gift of conversion”, he said.
Asked if he felt he was being used as a pawn of Mexico, Francis said he didn’t know.
He was greeted by a crowd chanting, “We love you, pope, we love you!” and “Francisco, friend, Chihuahua is with you”, before he spoke to about 800 prisoners and hundreds of their family members sitting in an outside yard. “I would do something very severe unless they contributed or gave us the money to build the wall”.
Profit and capital are not a good over and above the human person; they are at the service of the common good.
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While he can’t tell anyone who vote for, Francis said that what he can say is that “this man is not Christian if he has said things like that”.
