Life

Francis sharpens the political edge of his spiritual message

Pope Francis reinforced his place as spokesman for the world's disenfranchised during his visit to South America's poorest countries by visiting slums, encouraging the landless, urging care for the environment and insisting that the Catholic Church be a place of welcome for all

Pope Francis walks through an alley during his visit to the Banado Norte shantytown in Asuncion, Paraguay
Pope Francis walks through an alley during his visit to the Banado Norte shantytown in Asuncion, Paraguay Pope Francis walks through an alley during his visit to the Banado Norte shantytown in Asuncion, Paraguay

POPE Francis ended his six-day, three-country pilgrimage to South America's poorest countries with a huge Mass in Paraguay and words of hope and faith for young and old.

Whatever spiritual succour the Argentinian Pope - the first from the continent - has offered to the millions of people who have come to hear him, many will be hopeful that his unashamedly political and anti-capitalist message leaves a lasting legacy.

On Sunday, the final day before returning to Rome, Francis sought to offer a message of hope to the residents of the Banado Norte shantytown and to an estimated one million people gathered for his farewell Mass on the same swampy field where Pope John Paul II proclaimed Paraguay's first saint nearly 30 years ago.

"How much pain can be soothed, how much despair can be allayed in a place where we feel at home," Francis said.

Then he outlined his vision of the Church: "Welcoming those who do not think as we do, who do not have faith or who have lost it. Welcoming the persecuted, the unemployed. Welcoming the different cultures, of which our Earth is so richly blessed. Welcoming sinners."

The stage for the Mass was dominated by a huge triptych with Francis's Jesuit insignia over the central altar, flanked on one side by images of his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, and the founder of his Jesuit religious order, St Ignatius Loyola, on the other.

The entire structure was a mosaic, paying tribute to the role Jesuit missionaries played in Paraguay and made from 40,000 ears of corn, 200,000 coconuts, 1,000 squash gourds and countless dried beans.

Francis has emphasised care for creation and its most oppressed people during his tour of Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay and the visit comes hot on the heels of the publication of Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment and the imperative to care for creation.

He drew cheers when he arrived at the start of the day in Banado Norte, saying he could not have left the country without visiting and "without being on your land".

Many of the shantytown's residents are squatters on municipal land who have come from the north-eastern part of the country where farmland has been increasingly bought up by Brazilians and multinational companies.

Residents argue they should be given title to the land because they have worked to make it habitable with little help from the city.

"We built our neighbourhoods piece by piece, we made them liveable despite the difficulties of the terrain, the rising of the river and despite public authorities who either ignored us or were hostile to us," resident Maria Garcia told the Pope.

Francis said he wanted to visit the neighbourhood to encourage the residents' faith despite the difficulties they encounter: "I wanted to see your faces, your children, your elderly, and to hear about your experiences and everything you went through to be here, to have a dignified life and a roof over your heads, to endure the bad weather and the flooding of these last few weeks."

Some of the estimated 100,000 residents shrieked as Francis walked by, reaching out to touch his white cassock and snap a photo with their mobile phones.

"Now I can die peacefully," said Francisca de Chamorra, an 82-year-old widow who moved to the slum in 1952. "It's a miracle that a Pope has come to this muddy place."

Francis left a final message before he left: stir things up, but then take responsibility for what you have done.

It was a modification of his famous exhortation in 2013, when in Rio de Janeiro - during his only other visit to South America as Pope, when he attended World Youth Day in Brazil - he told a church full of Argentine young people that he wanted them to "stir things up" in their dioceses by going "out to the peripheries".

Francis told tens of thousands of young people gathered in Paraguay's capital last Saturday that a fellow priest once told him that encouraging youths to disrupt things was all well and good, but that later others had to clean up after them.

So, Francis said, he was correcting himself. "Shake things up, but then clean it up and fix the mess that you've made," he said to roars of laughter.