Pope Francis returned to South America yesterday ahead of an eight-day tour of Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay, bringing with him a message of solidarity with impoverished people in the region.
The pope chose to visit those three countries specifically because they are among the poorest and most marginal nations in a region that is home to 40 percent of the world’s Catholics.
He is skipping his homeland of Argentina — possibly to avoid papal entanglement in this year’s presidential election.
Photo: AP
The trip started in Ecuador, where falling world prices for oil and minerals threaten to fray the social safety net woven by Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, who has been buffeted for nearly a month by the most serious anti-government street protests of his more than eight years in power.
The pope is expected to raise environmental concerns with Correa and Bolivian President Evo Morales — who have promoted mining and oil drilling in wilderness areas — given his recent encyclical on the need to protect nature and the poor who suffer most when it is exploited.
In that document, the pope called for a new development model that rejects today’s profit-at-all cost mentality in favor of what he describes as a Christian view of economic progress that respects human rights, safeguards the planet and involves all sectors of society, the poor and marginalized included.
In a video message on the eve of his departure, Francis said he wanted to bring a message of hope and joy to all “especially the neediest, the elderly, the sick, those in prison and the poor and all those who are victims of this ‘throwaway culture.’”
The pope’s itinerary includes a Bolivian prison, a Paraguayan shanty town and a meeting with Bolivian trash pickers, the sort of people to whom he ministered in the slums of Buenos Aires as archbishop.
Crowds are expected to be huge. While the nations themselves are tiny compared to regional powerhouses like Brazil and Argentina, they are fervently Catholic: 79 percent of the population in Ecuador is Catholic, 77 percent in Bolivia and 89 percent in Paraguay, the Pew Research Center has reported.
“You can imagine what this embrace of love will be, this devotion of our people toward the pope, the universal pastor who comes from Latin America,” Pontifical Commission for Latin America Secretary Guzman Carriquiri said.
The Vatican said it expects more than 1 million people to turn out for Francis’ major public Masses in each nation.
In Ecuador in 1985, John Paul II called for a more just society and reminded indigenous groups of the role played by missionaries who had arrived on the continent centuries before.
Francis is expected to repeat those messages and to pay particular attention to the role his Jesuit order played.
John Paul II’s visits were shadowed by the Polish pope’s concern about the rise of liberation theology, fearing that Marxists were using its “preferential option for the poor” to turn the Gospel into a call for armed revolution.
Carriquiri said a less turbulent situation awaits Francis, who has sought to revive what proponents describe as a purer, less political version of liberation theology and who recently approved beatification for one of its heroes, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Francis also brokered a thaw between the US and Cuba, countries he is to visit in September.
“Francis’ visit will be a huge boost to the priests of the Third World and theology of liberation,” fellow Jesuit Xavier Albo said. “He lives that theology through mercy, modesty and his obligation to the poor, the immigrants and the imprisoned.”
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