The fun began early for Pope Francis on his trip to Mexico, writes Greg Daly
Pope Francis’ trip to Mexico could hardly have had a more dramatic overture, with his flight from Rome’s Fiumicino airport stopping over in Cuba for a meeting with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The historic encounter between the Pope and the head of the world’s second-largest Church was as clear a manifestation there has yet been of that “ecumenism of blood” of which the Pontiff has so often spoken, sparked as it was by a need to speak out in common about the plight of Christians in the Middle East.
It could hardly have contrasted more sharply, however, with the festive atmosphere on the papal plane, which had seen journalists giving Pope Francis letters from Mexican immigrants in the United States, a basket of cookies and even a sombrero.
The sombrero was a gift from Valentina Alazraki, a Mexican journalist who had given similar Mariachi hats to St John Paul in 1979 and again in 1999; she had not given Pope Benedict XVI his similar hat when he visited Mexico in 2012 as plans had already been made for him to receive one in Guanajato.
The plane landed in Mexico’s “Benito Juárez” International Airport that evening, as planned months earlier; the Pope had set off from Rome five hours earlier than originally arranged in order to facilitate the Cuban interlude. After his arrival, he briefly appeared outside the Apostolic Nunciature, where he told people they “needed to rest” ahead of the coming event-filled weekend, and accepted two white roses from well-wishers.
Tenderness
After leading the crowd in a Hail Mary, he addressed them briefly, saying. “Look at the Virgin and remember these faces: The people who love us, those we love, those we do not like, those who do not like us, and are envious of us.”
Saturday morning saw the Pope being officially welcomed to Mexico at the National Palace, where he paid a courtesy visit to the country’s president Enrique Pena Nieto. The two men spoke and exchanged gifts in a private meeting before the Pope was introduced to members of the diplomatic corps and of civil society before travelling to the Cathedral of the Assumption where he met with bishops.
Long known for liking bishops with “the smell of sheep” about them, in his searing 4,500-word address he spelled out in detail exactly what it is he expects of his brother bishops. Maintaining that “the only power capable of conquering the hearts of men and women is the tenderness of God”, he reeled off a list of ways in which bishops can fail.
Some, he said, suffer from a “proud self-sufficiency”, or are otherwise cold, indifferent, or prone to clericalism, while others fear transparency as though the Church needs “darkness to carry out her work”; some are focused on their careers, some given over to gossip and intrigue, some corrupted by “trivial materialism”, and some hide behind “anodyne denunciations” of social ills but do nothing to address them.
The list went on, until at last Francis declared “we do not need princes but rather a community of the Lord’s witnesses”. While expressing confidence in the bishops’ ability to face the challenges before them, he ended his address with a warning about the fate that would be in store for careless shepherds who lose their flocks: “Woe to us pastors if we allow his Bride to wander because we have set up tents where the Bridegroom cannot be found!”
Making clear his wish to see and spend time with the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Pontiff had asked the assembled bishops: “Could the Successor of Peter, called from the far south of Latin America, deprive himself of seeing la Virgen Morenita?” Predictably, then, Mass in the basilica at Guadalupe would be at the heart of his first full day in Mexico.
In his homily at the basilica, Pope Francis echoed the words of his predecessor’s inaugural Mass when he said, “We are all necessary,” drawing on his frequent theme of the ‘throwaway culture’ as he continued, “especially those who normally do not count because they are not ‘up to the task’ or ‘they do not have the necessary funds’ to build all these things.”
Poor
The Pope returned to his perennial theme of how he dreams of a ‘Church of the Poor’ when he said that through the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego: “God roused the hope of the little ones, of the suffering, of those displaced or rejected, of all who feel they have no worthy place in these lands.”
While many might be tempted to think only of so venerable a spot as the shrine on the ‘Tepeyac’ hill above Mexico City where Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 as “God’s shrine”, the Pontiff explained that God’s shrine is not limited to places so obviously sanctified.
“God’s Shrine”, he said, “is the life of his children, of everyone in whatever condition, especially of young people without a future who are exposed to endless painful and risky situations, and the elderly who are unacknowledged, forgotten and out of sight. The Shrine of God is our families in need only of the essentials to develop and progress.
“The Shrine of God is the faces of the many people we encounter each day,” he said.
Just as Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego in the 16th Century as God’s ambassador, the Pontiff said, so she urges us today to be her ambassadors, walking along the paths of our neighbourhoods, parishes, and communities.
“Be my ambassador, she says to us,” he continued, “giving food to the hungry, drink to those who thirst, a refuge to those in need, clothe the naked and visit the sick. Come to the aid of your neighbour, forgive whoever has offended you, console the grieving, be patient with others, and above all beseech and pray to God.”
After delivering his homily, he sat silently for several minutes before the tilma, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that has been venerated since Juan Diego told the local bishop of what he seen all those centuries ago. The Pope had expressed in advance a wish to spend time praying privately with the image, and as the service continued he sat in quiet contemplation.
The following morning, Francis was flown by helicopter over the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan to Ecatapec, Mexico City’s most heavily populated suburb and a city of almost two million people in its own right.
One of the most impoverished and violent places in Mexico, Ecatapec has one of the highest rates of killings in the country – triple the national average, and even higher than the murder rates in Morelia and Ciudad Juarez – as well as one of the highest rates of missing women. Last July the city was specifically highlighted when the Secretariat of the Interior declared an emergency in Mexico state – the state which surrounds Mexico City to west, north, and east.
Crime
Poverty and crime had all been pointed to in his Guadalupe homily, but at Ecatapec, where life is too often defined by these issues, the Pope spoke at length about the dangers posed by the triple temptation of “wealth, vanity and pride”.
Having already expressed his vision of a Church of the poor, he addressed a crowd of at least 350,000 – it is thought as many as a million others were gathered nearby – and advised them that Lent is a time of conversion, and a time to take up arms against those temptations that can draw us away from what we are called to do and make us into people other than who we are called to be.
Describing Lent as a time “for letting our eyes be opened to the frequent injustices which stand in direct opposition to the dream and the plan of God”, he said there are three temptations of Christ that “try to corrode us and tear us down”.
Wealth is a temptation, he said, whether for ourselves or for those we see as our own people. He warned against “taking the ‘bread’ based on the toil of others, or even at the expense of their very lives”, describing this as tasting of “pain, bitterness and suffering”.
Vanity, he continued, is a futile “pursuit of prestige based on continuous, relentless exclusion of those who ‘are not like me’”, with this leading in turn to pride, which he linked with hypocrisy and cast as “putting oneself on a higher level than one truly is on, feeling that one does not share the life of ‘mere mortals’, and yet being one who prays every day: ‘I thank you Lord that you have not made me like those others…’”
Sin
Taken together, these temptations “seek to corrode, destroy and extinguish the joy and freshness of the Gospel”, he said, and by doing so “lock us into a cycle of destruction and sin”.
There is, he said, breaking away from his prepared text, little point in engaging with those – such as drug cartels – who deliberately perpetuate conditions such as those in Ecatapec, crying “We have chosen Jesus, not the evil one! Let’s get this straight in our heads: You can’t dialogue with the Devil!”
After Mass he delivered his Angelus address, quoting Blessed Paul VI: “A Christian cannot but show solidarity… to solve the situation of those who have not yet received the bread of culture or the opportunity of an honorable job,” he said, continuing, “He cannot remain insensitive while the new generations have not found the way to bring into reality their legitimate aspirations.”
Calling on those who had attended the Mass, many of whom had braved freezing overnight conditions to do so, to be on the front lines of social change, he urged them to promote initiatives to help Mexico become a land “where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream” he said.
Dealers of death
This Mexico, he said, should be a place where people have “no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death”.
In speaking so not merely of crime and unemployment but of the need for migration, Pope Francis was pointing to another key theme of his trip, one that is expected to be central to his final Mexican Mass, to be held tomorrow – Wednesday – in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the last stop for so many Mexicans who seek new lives in the United States.
Helicoptered back to Mexico City, the Pontiff visited the Federico Gómez Pediatric Hospital, where a sixteen-year-old girl with cancer sang ‘Ave Maria’ for him.
Predictably delighting the children and staff at the hospital, the Pope told how he had been thinking of the story of Simeon’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Temple, an encounter that had filled the old man with gratitude and the desire to bless.
Saying that he could relate to these two feelings, saying “on the one hand, entering here and seeing your eyes, your smiles, your faces, has filled me with a desire to give thanks”, and then thanking the children for the kindness of their welcome and how they recognised the tenderness shown by those who care for them. He thanked too those who care for the children, and gave his blessing to all those there, whether caring or being cared for, and their families.
Monday, then, saw the Pope visiting Chiapas in the south of Mexico, where before an indigenous community in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, he said the “true face of God is seen” in his cry in Exodus: “Enough! No more! I have seen their affliction, I have heard their cry, I know their sufferings.”
Describing God’s word as “a symbol of freedom, a symbol of happiness, wisdom and light”, he lamented our failures to respect this, such that the violence in our wonded hearts can also be reflected in “symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life”.
Indigenous
Insisting that we can no longer remain silent in the face of one of the greatest environmental challenges in our history, he said that Mexico’s indigenous people have “much to teach us”.
Drawing on the Aparecida document of the Latin American bishops, he said the native American peoples “know how to interact harmoniously with nature, which they respect as a ‘source of food, a common home and an altar of human sharing’”.
And yet, he continued, too often the native peoples of Latin America have been misunderstood, excluded, and mistreated. “Some have considered your values, culture and traditions to be inferior,” he said, continuing, “others, intoxicated by power, money and market trends, have stolen your lands or contaminated them.”
How worthwhile it would be, he said, for each of us to examine our consciences and appeal for forgiveness. “Today’s world,” he said, “ravaged as it is by a throwaway culture, needs you!”