ECATEPEC, Mexico (CNS) — Pope Francis began his travels to Mexico’s “peripheries” by visiting an overcrowded, sprawling settlement known internationally as a hunting ground for girls to force into prostitution and for boys to enlist in the drug trade.

Ecatepec, on the northern edge of Mexico City, also has tidy gated communities and a new shopping mall with department stores like Sears, a big WalMart, Starbucks and dozens of other shops and restaurants.

Pope Francis celebrated Mass Feb. 14 on a vast open field with some 300,000 people. The high altar platform was decorated with Aztec designs — flowers and birds — made of flowers and petals.

More than 1.7 million people live in Ecatepec, which, Vatican Radio described as “a lawless neighborhood where organized crime, pollution and poverty reign and where most people fear to tread.” Like Ciudad Juárez in the north was a decade ago, Ecatepec has now become famous as a place where it is particularly dangerous to be a woman because of murders, kidnappings and human trafficking.

Sr. Angelica Garcia Barela, a member of the Servant Missionaries of the Word, was thrilled the pope was visiting. “He comes to show the faith and to change hearts. The pope’s faith, his enthusiasm and joy, isn’t fleeting and it’s contagious. Much can change.”

With other members of her order, Sister Garcia spent the night at the Mass site so she would be in place early to watch over the pre-consecrated hosts she would help distribute during Communion to people far from the papal altar.

Her main ministry is going door-to-door sharing the Bible with families. She knows how to evangelize and said Pope Francis is the perfect example of “evangelization through presence.”

After Mass, Pope Francis recited the Angelus with the thousands gathered on the dusty field. Before leading the prayer, he recognized “how much each one of you has suffered to reach this moment, how much you have ‘walked’ to make this day a day of feasting, a time of thanksgiving.”

He urged the people to step up and work together to “make this blessed land of Mexico a land of opportunities.”

It should be a land where, he said, there is “no need to emigrate in order to dream, 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 his homily, Pope Francis did not specifically mention the violence against women or the drug traffickers, but instead addressed the ways in which people give into little temptations that too easily grow into great evil.

In the Gospel story of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the desert, the pope said, “Jesus does not respond to the devil with his own words, instead he uses the words of God, the words of Scripture. Because, brothers and sisters, ingrain this in your minds: You cannot dialogue with the devil!

“You cannot dialogue with the devil because he will always win,” he insisted. “Only the power of the Word of God can defeat him.”

Lent, the pope said, is a time of conversion, which involves acknowledging each day how the devil tries to tempt and divide people. In a country known for huge inequalities in income and opportunity, Pope Francis denounced as a work of the devil the idea of “a society of the few and for the few.”

“Three great temptations” — wealth, vanity and pride — are behind such an attitude and so many other ills that destroy society and attack human dignity, he said.

The sinful use of money and material things, he said, is “seizing hold of goods destined for all and using them only for ‘my own people.’” It involves living off the sweat and labor of others, “even at the expense of their very lives,” the pope said.

Such “bread,” he said, “tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering. This is the bread that a corrupt family or society gives its own children.”

“We know what it means to be seduced by money, fame and power,” Pope Francis said. “For this reason, the Church gives us the gift of this Lenten season, invites us to conversion, offering but one certainty: he is waiting for us and wants to heal our hearts of all that tears us down. He is the God who has a name: mercy. His name is our wealth.”

At the end of Mass, Bishop Oscar Domínguez Couttolenc of Ecatepec told the pope that “like many other places, we experience poverty and violence, made flesh in the pain of those who suffer because of corruption, hunger, poverty and all the manifestations of evil that lead to the deterioration of our common home.”

In response, he said, the faithful of Ecatepec pray, reflect and work, trying to live a “spirituality of communion,” a sense of solidarity strengthened by the pope’s visit.

Before landing by helicopter in Ecatepec, Pope Francis was treated to a special aerial viewing of the nearby Teotihuacan Pyramids, believed to date from about 300 B.C.

― By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service. Contributing to this story was Junno Arocho Esteves in Mexico City.

MEXICO CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis fulfilled his much-desired wish to pray in silence before the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

After celebrating the first Mass of his papal trip to Mexico Feb. 13, the pope made his way to the “camarin” (“little room”) behind the main altar of the basilica dedicated to Mary. The miraculous mantle, which normally faces the congregation, can be turned around to allow a closer and more private moment of veneration.

Laying a bouquet of yellow roses in front of the image, the pope sat down in prayerful silence with eyes closed and head bowed. After roughly 20 minutes, the pope stood up, laid his hand on the image and departed from the small room.

About 12,000 people packed the basilica for the papal Mass and another 30,000 were watching on screens set up in the outer courtyard. Built in 1976, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is located near Tepeyac hill, the site of Mary’s apparitions to St. Juan Diego in 1531. With some 12 million people visiting each year, it is Catholicism’s most popular Marian shrine.

In his homily, the pope reflected on the Gospel reading, which recalled Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth. Mary’s humility in saying “yes” to God’s will, he said, is a response “which prompted her to give the best of herself, going forth to meet others.”

That very humility also led her to appear to a poor indigenous man, he said. “Just as she made herself present to little Juan, so too she continues to reveal herself to all of us, especially to those who feel — like him — ‘worthless,’” the pope said.

Recalling the miraculous appearance of Mary’s image, Pope Francis noted that through such a miracle, “Juan experienced in his own life what hope is, what the mercy of God is.”

The pope said that despite the indigenous saint’s feelings of inadequacy, Mary chose him to “oversee, care for, protect and promote the building of this shrine.”

“In this way, she managed to awaken something he did not know how to express, a veritable banner of love and justice: no one could be left out in the building of that other shrine: the shrine of life, the shrine of our communities, our societies and our cultures,” he said.

God’s true shrine, he added, is the life of his children, especially young people without a future, the elderly who are often unacknowledged and forgotten and families lacking even the most basic necessities.

“The shrine of God is the faces of the many people we encounter each day,” the pope said.

Pope Francis said that those who suffer do not weep in vain and their sufferings are a silent prayer that rises to heaven, “always finding a place in Mary’s mantle.”

Like St. Juan Diego, Christians are called to be Mary’s ambassadors and console those who are overwhelmed by trials and sufferings, he said.

“‘Am I not your mother? Am I not here with you?’ Mary says this to us again. Go and build my shrine, help me to lift up the lives of my sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters,” the pope said.

― By Junno Arocho Esteves, Catholic News Service.

MEXICO CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis demanded forceful denunciations of drug violence in Mexico from the country’s bishops, who have preferred timid pronouncements instead of speaking prophetically on a tragedy that has claimed more than 100,000 lives over the past 10 years and left another 25,000 Mexicans missing.

Speaking Feb. 13 to an audience of bishops in Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, Pope Francis urged them to confront the scourge of drug cartels and organized crime by raising their voices, developing pastoral plans, and “drawing in and embracing the fringes of human existence in the ravaged areas of our cities.”

“I urge you not to underestimate the moral and anti-social challenge, which the drug trade represents for young people and Mexican society as a whole,” Pope Francis said. “The magnitude of this phenomenon … and the gravity of the violence … do not allow us as pastors of the Church to hide behind anodyne denunciations.”

The pope spoke to the Mexican bishops for more than 40 minutes, delivering a tough talk on matters the pope plans to highlight in his six-day Mexican trip, including violence, migrants and indigenous issues. In off-the-cuff remarks, he warned of “the temptation of aloofness and clericalism” for bishops, called for clerical transparency and asked for unity in the Mexican bishops’ conference, which has pursued closer ties with political leaders in recent years, while speaking softly — if at all — on uncomfortable issues such as corruption.

Pope Francis hit hardest on the drug issue, something retired Pope Benedict XVI said nothing about in his 2012 trip to Mexico. It’s an issue that has vexed Mexico and the Catholic Church over the past decade as a crackdown on drug cartels and organized crime has caused violence to rise, along with offenses such as extortion and kidnapping. Many of those victims and victimizers were baptized Catholics.

The violence has claimed the lives more than a dozen priests over the past five years, while some dioceses have been accused of collecting “narcolimosnas” or “drug alms,” and drug bosses — who often consider themselves proper Catholics — construct and fix parishes and sponsor patron saint feast days.

Pope Francis urged “prophetic courage” and implementing a pastoral approach of going to the peripheries, working with families and building bridges with parish communities, schools and the authorities, saying that only then “will people finally escape the raging waters that drown so many, either victims of the drug trade or those who stand before God with their hands drenched in blood, though with pockets filled with sordid money and their consciences deadened.”

Pope Francis also alluded to the folkloric Santa Muerte, a skeletal pseudo-saint attracting hordes of followers in Mexico and Latin America, including many in the illegal drug trade.

“I am particularly concerned about those many persons who, seduced by the empty power of the world, praise illusions and embrace their macabre symbols to commercialize death in exchange for money which, in the end, ‘moth and rust consume,’” he said.

The rise of Santa Muerte worship over the past 15 years has alarmed the Mexican Church and drawn Vatican condemnations, said Andrew Chesnut, religious studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied the pseudo-saint and estimates it now has 10 million followers in Mexico and abroad.

“It’s the chief concern of the Mexican Church in terms of religious rivals,” he said. “A week doesn’t go by in which some Mexican bishop or priest denounces it as satanic.”

Still, Pope Francis praised popular piety, common in Mexico, where the faithful adore the saints and participate in pilgrimages, while ignoring the sacramental part of the Church.

“I invite you to give yourselves tirelessly and fearlessly to the task of evangelizing and deepening the faith by means of a mystagogical catechesis that treasures the popular religiosity of people,” Pope Francis said. “Our times require pastoral attention to persons and groups who hope to encounter the living Jesus.”

He also lauded the Church for its work with the many mostly Central American migrants transiting the country on trips that expose them to crime such as extortion, robbery and rape.

“There are millions of sons and daughters of the Church who today live in the diaspora or who are in transit, journeying to the North in search of new opportunities,” he said, calling migration, “the challenge of our age.”

Pope Francis plans to celebrate Mass a stone’s throw from the U.S. border in Ciudad Juárez Feb. 17, when he is expected to expand on the migrant issue.

The pope travels to Chiapas at the other end of the country Feb. 15 for a Mass with Mexico’s indigenous peoples, who have fallen away from the Church in droves. He urged the bishops to build a Church more inclusive for indigenous peoples, who often live in impoverished conditions and in communities where Spanish is seldom spoken.

“I ask you to show singular tenderness in the way you regard indigenous peoples and their fascinating but not infrequently decimated cultures,” Pope Francis said.

“Mexico needs its American-Indian roots so as not to remain an unresolved enigma. The indigenous people of Mexico still await true recognition of the richness of their contribution and the fruitfulness of their presence.”

Pope Francis expressed his admiration for Our Lady of Guadalupe, who “teaches us that the only power capable of conquering the hearts of men and women is the tenderness of God.”

He also told the bishops, “We do not need ‘princes,’ but rather a community of the Lord’s witnesses.

“Do not allow yourselves to be corrupted by trivial materialism or by the seductive illusion of underhanded agreements,” he added in an allusion to suggestions that bishops sometimes smooth things out behind closed doors with corrupt officials and even criminals, instead of acting publicly. “Do not place your faith in the ‘chariots and horses’ of today’s pharaohs, for our strength is in the pillar of fire that divides the sea in two, without much fanfare.”

He ended with a call for unity, departing from his prepared comments to do so.

“If you have to fight, then fight; if you have to say things, say them but like men, face-to-face, like men of God, who can pray together, who can discern together, and if you argue to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “But always maintain the unity of the episcopal body.”

Church observers said the pope’s message was unprecedented for Mexico, where the bishops’ conference has become quite conservative over the past quarter-century as the Church and government restored relations. In some Catholic circles, critical voices on issues such as human right have been considered an impediment to that process.

“Francis is saying something along the lines of ‘I am aware of the differences among you,’” said Rodolfo Soriano Nuñez, a sociologist and Church observer in Mexico City. “There are lots of ‘sects’ within the Mexican bishops, groups that fight bitterly with each other while trying to offer themselves as the most reliable partners to the government.”

― By David Agren, Catholic News Service.

MEXICO CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis told Mexico’s president and government officials that the country’s future can be bright only if government and business leaders put an end to a culture of “favors” for the influential and scraps for the poor.

“Experience teaches us that each time we seek the path of privileges or benefits for a few to the detriment of the good of all, sooner or later the life of society becomes a fertile soil for corruption, drug trade, exclusion of different cultures, violence and also human trafficking, kidnapping and death, bringing suffering and slowing down development,” the pope said Feb. 13 during a meeting with the leaders at the National Palace.

The pope had landed in Mexico the evening before for a six-day visit. Because of the late hour and the long flight from Rome via Cuba, the official welcoming ceremony was scheduled for the next morning. But that did not stop thousands of Mexicans from packing stadium-type stands at the airport to welcome the pope with singing, dancing and a mariachi band.

Thousands of people also lined the streets from the airport to the Vatican nunciature, where the pope was staying, and a large crowd was gathered there to greet him.

Pope Francis, stopping outside for a while, told them, “Tonight, do not forget to look at Mary and think of the people we love and those who do not love us.” He said good night after leading them in the recitation of the Hail Mary.

Before the trip, the pope repeatedly spoke of his devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and his desire to spend time in prayer before the tilma or cloak imprinted with the image of Mary.

Pope Francis gave President Enrique Peña Nieto a mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe made by the Vatican Mosaic Studio; it includes tiny glass tiles that encase gold leaf.

Although protocol dictated the pope’s time at the palace be treated as a state visit, Peña Nieto told the pope, “Your visit transcends an encounter between two states; it is the encounter of a people with its faith.”

“You will find a generous and hospitable people,” the president told him, “a people who are Guadalupan.”

Speaking to the president and government officials, the pope insisted that, like Mary, who took on the traits of Mexico’s indigenous peoples in a sign of respect, Mexico’s leaders must value the multicultural makeup of its people.

Mexico’s “ancestral culture” combined with the youth of its population “should be a stimulus to find new forms of dialogue, negotiation and bridges that can lead us on the way of committed solidarity,” the pope said.

Those who identify themselves as Christian must be exemplars of dialogue and solidarity, he said, and those who truly value politics as public service must as well. There is no other way, the pope said, to build “a society in which no one feels like a victim of the culture of waste” and, therefore, disposable.

Mexico’s population is about 120 million; 28 percent of them are 14 years old or younger and another 18 percent are 15-24 years old. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks Mexico as one of the countries with the greatest income inequality and reports 21 percent of its population lives in poverty.

Pope Francis told government leaders that those young people are a treasure, a bundle of energy and hope for the future. But the country cannot realize that future hope if the current generation of adults and leaders do not teach values and, especially, if they do not live them.

“A hope-filled future is forged in a present made up of men and women who are upright, honest and capable of working for the common good,” the pope said, adding that, unfortunately, today the common good “is not in such great demand.”

With dialogue and respect, he said, all Mexicans can be helped to contribute to building a better society where there is “real access” to necessary material and spiritual goods: “adequate housing, dignified employment, food, true justice, effective security, a healthy and peaceful environment.”

― By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service. Contributing to this story was Junno Arocho Esteves in Mexico City.

HAVANA (CNS) — At long last, Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow embraced, kissing each other three times.

“Finally,” the pope told the patriarch Feb. 12 as they met in a lounge at Havana’s José Martí International Airport. “We are brothers,” he told the patriarch.

Amid the clicking of cameras and multiple flashes, Patriarch Kirill was overheard telling the pope, “Things are easier now.”

“It is clearer that this is God’s will,” Pope Francis told him.

A flight of almost 12 hours capped months of intense negotiations and more than two decades of Vatican overtures to bring a pope and a Russian patriarch together for the first time.

Cuban President Raúl Cástro played host to the pope and patriarch, who was on a visit to Russian Orthodox communities on the island-nation. Pope Francis had a pastoral visit to Mexico planned for months; the stop in Havana was announced only a week before the meeting.

Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill signed a joint declaration that emphasized the things the two Churches have in common.

Addressing the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, they said that “whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated.” They called on the international community “to act urgently in order to prevent the further expulsion” of Christians, to end violence and terrorism and to ensure that large amounts of humanitarian aid reach the victims of violence.

“In raising our voice in defense of persecuted Christians, we wish to express our compassion for the suffering experienced by the faithful of other religious traditions who have also become victims of civil war, chaos and terrorist violence,” they said.

“Attempts to justify criminal acts with religious slogans are altogether unacceptable,” they said. “No crime may be committed in God’s name.”

They called those who have died “martyrs of our times” and said they helped unite various Churches “by their shared suffering.”

They spoke of the need to be vigilant against European integration that is “devoid of respect for religious identities.” They also spoke of extreme poverty, the “millions of migrants and refugees knocking on the doors of wealthy nations” and consumerism.

They spoke of life issues: abortion, euthanasia, new reproductive technologies and threats against the Churches’ view of marriage.

After they signed the document, the two leaders embraced, and each spoke briefly.

Patriarch Kirill said they had a two-hour, “open discussion with full awareness of the responsibility we have for our people, for the future of Christianity, and for the future of human civilization itself. It was a conversation filled with content that gave us the opportunity to understand and hear the position of the other. And the results of the conversation allow me to assure that currently both Churches can cooperate together to defend Christians around the world; with full responsibility to work together so that there may be no war; so that human life can be respected in the entire world; so that the foundations of human, family and social morality may be strengthened through the participation of the Church in the life of human modern society.”

Pope Francis said: “We spoke as brothers, we share the same baptism, we are bishops, we spoke about our Churches. We agreed that unity is done walking (together). We spoke clearly without mincing words. I confess that I felt the consolation of the Spirit in this dialogue. I am grateful for the humility of His Holiness, his fraternal humility and his good wishes for unity. We left with a series of initiatives that I believe are viable and can be done. “

He thanked Patriarch Kirill and others involved in arranging the meeting and also thanked Cuba, “the great Cuban people and their president here present. I am grateful for his active availability; if it continues this way, Cuba will be the ‘capital of unity.’“

Patriarch Kirill gave Pope Francis a small copy of an icon of Our Lady of Kazan, which itself is a symbol of Vatican-Russian Orthodox detente, but also of failed hopes. The oldest known copy of the icon, an ornate 18th-century piece had been hanging in St. John Paul II’s study for a decade as he hoped to return it to Russia personally. Instead, in 2004, he had Cardinal Walter Kasper take it back to its country of origin as a gesture of goodwill.

The icon is one of the most revered and replicated icons in Russian Orthodoxy.

Pope Francis gave Patriarch Kirill a reliquary with a relic of St. Cyril, the patriarch’s patron saint, and a chalice, which not only is a sign of hopes for full communion between the two Churches, but also a sign that the Catholic Church recognizes the validity of the Orthodox sacraments.

The addition of a stopover in Cuba was widely seen as a sign of Pope Francis’ willingness to go the extra mile to reach out a hand in friendship. At the same time, observers said, it gave those Russian Orthodox opposed to ecumenism a sense that their Church is special and that it bowed to no one in agreeing to the meeting.

In a commentary distributed Feb. 11, Ukrainian Catholic Bishop Borys Gudziak of Paris said: “The pope is demonstrating humility; he is going to the territory of the other. In the eyes of nostalgic Russians, Cuba is almost home territory, a last outpost of a lost Soviet Empire.”

For decades, the Russian Orthodox told the Vatican that a meeting between the patriarch and pope was impossible because of the activities of Latin-rite Catholics in Russia and, especially, the Eastern-rite Catholics in Ukraine.

The Moscow Patriarchate had said that while those problems still exist with the Catholic communities, they take a backseat to the urgency of defending together the rights and very existence of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

The harsh persecution of Christians and other minorities in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the region has been a cause Pope Francis has pleaded before world leaders and for which he has rallied the prayers of Christians across the globe.

He speaks often of the “ecumenism of blood,” the fact that Christians are killed for believing in Christ with the persecutors not knowing or caring what denomination or Church they belong to. Christians are fully united in that suffering and, the pope has said, those who die for their faith are in full communion with each other and with centuries of martyrs now in the presence of God.

But the fate of persecuted Christians was not the pope’s primary motive for meeting Patriarch Kirill. Simply meeting him was the point.

Metropolitan Hilarion Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s external affairs department, told reporters a week earlier that Patriarch Kirill chose Havana in the “New World” because Europe, the “Old World,” was the birthplace of Christian division.

Ukrainians, Catholic or not, have expressed concerns about Pope Francis’ meeting with Patriarch Kirill given the patriarch’s apparently close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time of ongoing fighting in Eastern Ukraine.

“The topics of discussion will not be explicitly political ones,” Bishop Gudziak wrote. “The gist of the rendezvous will be the encounter of Church leaders representing very different experiences, agendas, styles and spiritualities of ecclesial leadership. One can hardly expect revolutionary results. Yet, it is through encounter that spiritual change occurs. Let us pray for good spiritual fruit.”

― By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service. Contributing to this story was Junno Arocho Esteves in Mexico City.