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Pope Francis stressed the importance of the family, and especially the need to understand society as a “shared family”, during an open air mass in Ecuador on Monday in the first service of his tour of South America
“In each of our families and in the shared family that we all make up, no one should be discarded, everyone has worth,” the first Latin American pope told worshippers.
Mary teaches us, he said, “to put ourselves in the skin of others, in the shoes of others ... She teaches us that there is a 'we'.”
“Mary is mother,” Pope Francis got the crowd of hundreds of thousands of devotees gathered in the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil to repeatedly chant.
Francis gave a brief anecdote on equality and how he learned the importance of family from his own mother:
“'Everyone is worth the same,' my mother told me when I asked her 'Which of your five children do you love the most?' She said that like her five fingers, each of her children was as important as the other.”
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Ahora, este será el trayecto que seguirá la caravana del #papaFrancisco por #Guayaquil : pic.twitter.com/VpWLVlWGVD
— El Comercio Ecuador (@elcomerciocom)
July 6, 2015
Pope Francis began his one-day trip to the city conducting a brief mass at the Sanctuary of the Lord of Divine Mercy (Santuario del Señor de la Divina Misericordia). There he told the thousands congregated he will "carry you all in my heart,” before joking that he won’t charge for his blessings.
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He then moved on to Los Semanes park, where he conducted an open-air mass to an emotional and excited crowd just after 12 p.m. local time.
[EN VIVO] Papamóvil recorre el parque Samanes » http://t.co/bd9PWipSCq Fotos: @CancilleriaEc pic.twitter.com/p9AkZa0Pyi
— El Comercio Ecuador (@elcomerciocom)
July 6, 2015
Bus-loads of people have been arriving in Guayaquil since Saturday night, including people from neighboring nations Colombia and Peru. Flags from nations as far away as Argentina and Puerto Rico were spotted among the crowd, El Comercio reported.
Upon his arrival in Ecuador Sunday, the pope expressed support for Correa’s policies, saying for his work “serving Ecuador’s people,” he “may always count on the commitment and collaboration of the church.”
Francis, the first pope from the southern hemisphere, will return to Ecuador’s capital Quito on Monday evening. He will move on to Bolivia and Paraguay later in the week.
