Pope Francis urges governments to ‘open hearts’ to migrants
Pope had message of love for Mexico, tough love for powerful
(about 3 hours later)
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — In a moment filled with powerful political symbolism, Pope Francis prayed Wednesday at Mexico’s dusty northern border for the thousands of migrants who have died trying to reach the United States and appealed for governments to open their hearts, if not their borders, to the “human tragedy that is forced migration.”
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Pope Francis wrapped up a five-day visit to Mexico with a message of love and compassion for the people of Mexico and the migrants who pass through it on their way to the United States. For their political and religious leaders, the trip was more a lesson in tough love.
“No more death! No more exploitation!” he implored.
The pontiff used his time here to criticize Mexico’s ruling class for failing to protect people from predatory criminal gangs and rampant corruption, and he lectured bishops to get closer to their flock and ease their suffering. He also visited some of the country’s poorest and most violent areas to shine a spotlight on residents’ harsh reality.
It was the most poignant moment of Francis’ five-day trip to Mexico and one of the most powerful images in recent times: History’s first Latin American pope, who has demanded countries welcome people fleeing persecution, war and poverty, praying at the border between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, at a time of soaring anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. presidential campaign.
The final day on Wednesday was the most symbolic and politically bold moment of Francis’ trip, with hundreds of thousands gathering for Mass at a Ciudad Juarez fairground while an estimated 30,000 more watched via simulcast at a football stadium across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas.
Francis stopped short of calling for the U.S. to open its borders during a Mass celebrated just yards (meters) from the frontier. But in his homily, beamed live into the Sun Bowl stadium on the El Paso side, Francis called for “open hearts” and recognition that those fleeing gangland executions and extortion in their homelands are victims of the worst forms of exploitation.
Francis also aimed a message north of the border at a time of increasingly tough presidential campaign rhetoric on immigration in the United States.
The pope appealed for governments to open their hearts to the “human tragedy” of forced migration. “No more death! No more exploitation!” he implored.
Francis stopped short of calling outright for the U.S. to open its borders, but he urged recognition that the multitudes fleeing gangland killings and extortion in their homelands are victims.
“We cannot deny the humanitarian crisis which in recent years has meant the migration of thousands of people, whether by train or highway or on foot, crossing hundreds of kilometers through mountains, deserts and inhospitable zones,” he said. “They are our brothers and sisters, who are being expelled by poverty and violence, drug trafficking and organized crime.”
“We cannot deny the humanitarian crisis which in recent years has meant the migration of thousands of people, whether by train or highway or on foot, crossing hundreds of kilometers through mountains, deserts and inhospitable zones,” he said. “They are our brothers and sisters, who are being expelled by poverty and violence, drug trafficking and organized crime.”
Francis also praised the work of activists who “are on the front lines, often risking their own lives” to help those caught up in the migration crisis. “By their very lives, they are prophets of mercy,” he said.
“It’s a message directed at everyone, from the authorities to ourselves,” said Natalia Herrera Miranda, a Juarez resident who was at the Mass. “And Americans as well, so that they take immigrants in and see them for what they are — people just like everyone else.”
And then, in a pointed message, Francis added a politically charged greeting to the 30,000 people gathered in the Sun Bowl to watch the simulcast on giant TV screens.
Before the Mass, Francis paused at the border for a silent prayer in memory of migrants who died trying to reach the United States. He also blessed several hundred migrants sitting on the other side of the fence.
“Thanks to the help of technology, we can pray, sing and celebrate together this merciful love which the Lord gives us, and which no frontier can prevent us from sharing,” Francis said. “Thank you, brothers and sisters of El Paso, for making us feel like one family and the same Christian community.”
Angelica Ortiz, one of those invited to be on the U.S. side, said she left Ciudad Juarez because drug traffickers threatened her son’s life and now lives in El Paso after being granted asylum.
Immigrants gathered in El Paso said they were greatly moved by the words of Francis, who flew back to Italy after the Mass.
“I’m overcome by emotion,” Ortiz said afterward, practically speechless. “A lot of emotion.”
Angelica Ortiz, who was among some 500 people who were invited to be on the U.S. side, could barely speak after the pope’s prayer. “I’m overcome by emotion,” she said, “a lot of emotion.”
It was the most poignant moment of Francis’ trip, but he began to turn heads even before his plane touched down in Mexico.
People at the Mass also expressed happiness with the pope’s message.
Flying in from the Vatican on Friday he first landed in Havana for a historic meeting and embrace with Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first such encounter since the schism that divided Christianity a millennium ago.
Wiping away tears, Angeles Arevalo said the pontiff’s call for compassion toward migrants would be heard on both sides of the border. “They are watching us from there as well,” she said, alluding to the simulcast in El Paso.
Once in Mexico, Francis appeared to go beyond the normally gentle criticism that popes make on foreign trips, holding the feet of Mexico’s powerful to the fire again and again.
Marielena Torres also felt Francis’ words could bring changes in attitudes about immigration: “He is the Holy Father, and he can help a lot.”
On his first full day in the country, Francis told President Enrique Pena Nieto and other members of the government in a speech at the National Palace that public officials must be honest and not be seduced by privilege and corruption.
Francis, the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, had wanted to cross the border in solidarity with other migrants when he visited the U.S. last fall. That wasn’t possible for logistical reasons, so he did the next best thing Wednesday by coming within a stone’s throw of the fence to pray and lay a bouquet of flowers next to a large crucifix that is to remain at the site as a monument to his visit.
He followed that up with a pointed address to his own bishops in which he admonished them to be true pastors, not career-minded clerics who spew inoffensive denunciations like so many “babbling orphans beside a tomb.”
While migrant activists on both sides of the border cheered the gesture, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump criticized it as a politicized and ill-informed move.
“We do not need ‘princes,’ but rather a community of the Lord’s witnesses,” Francis said.
“I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico,” Trump said in an interview last week with Fox television. “I think Mexico got him to do it because they want to keep the border just the way it is. They’re making a fortune, and we’re losing.”
Moving on to the hardscrabble Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec, Francis condemned drug traffickers as “dealers of death” and urged Mexicans to shun the temptation of money, saying, “With the devil, there is no dialogue.” He repeated a similar message two days later in the violence-torn state of Michoacan, telling young people that Jesus “would never ask us to be hit men.”
He and fellow GOP hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz have vowed to expel all the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally and build a wall along the border from Texas to California.
In the poor state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, Francis denounced centuries of exploitation and exclusion of indigenous Mexicans. He also prayed before the tomb of a priest who had made it his mission to protect the indigenous, often irking the church hierarchy in the process.
Asked to comment on the criticism, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope is concerned about the plight of migrants everywhere, not just in the United States.
Observers said the pontiff’s actions, words and choice of events showed he feels both the Mexican church and the government have failed the country’s poorest and most vulnerable.
“The pope always talks about migration problems all around the world, of the duties we have to solve these problems in a humane manner,” Lombardi said Tuesday.
“The pope literally believes that the devil is on the loose in Mexico, sowing death, misery and resignation, and he believes that the state, the church and the drug dealers are complicit,” said Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “He believes that Mexico, with the second-largest Catholic population in the world, is going through an acute moral and political crisis and that the church needs to become an active agent to build a more just Mexico.”
The Mass, celebrated in a field along a highway that parallels the Rio Grande, marked the climactic end of Francis’ five-day swing through some of Mexico’s most marginalized places, where drug-fueled violence has soared thanks to the complicity of police and other public institutions. Francis took both church and state to task for failing their people and urged the next generations to resist the lure of the drug trade.
In a speech Wednesday to workers and employers, Francis warned that without job opportunities, Mexico’s youth risk being seduced into the drug trade. “Poverty becomes the best breeding ground for the young to fall into the cycle of drug-trafficking and violence,” he said.
He urged employers to think instead of the Mexico they want to leave for their children.
“Do you want to leave them the memory of exploitation, of insufficient pay, of workplace harassment?” he asked. “What air will they breathe? An air tainted by corruption, violence, insecurity and suspicion or, on the contrary, an air capable of generating alternatives, renewal and change?”
“God will hold today’s slave-drivers accountable,” he warned.
Francis began his final day at Ciudad Juarez’s Prison No. 3, where he told about 700 inmates at a chapel that they cannot undo the past but must believe that things can change. They all have the possibility of “writing a new story and moving forward,” Francis said.
His message of hope came days after 49 inmates died in a riot at different prison in northern Mexico prison, where prisoners fought with hammers and makeshift knives. Eight more were injured Tuesday in a brawl at yet another prison.
Not long ago Juarez was the murder capital of the world as cartel-backed gang warfare fed homicide rates that hit 230 per 100,000 residents in 2010. A rash of killings of women, many of them poor factory workers who just disappeared, attracted international attention.
Times have changed, though. Last year, the city’s homicide rate was about 20 per 100,000 people, roughly on par with Mexico’s nationwide average of 14 per 100,000 — and well below current hotspots of drug violence, such as the Pacific resort city of Acapulco and surrounding Guerrero state.
Many businesses that closed during Juarez’s darkest years have reopened. Tourists are again crossing over from the United States and people say they no longer have to leave parties early to avoid being on the streets after dark.
“At least now we can go out. We can walk around a little more at that time of night,” said resident Lorena Diaz, standing under a huge banner of Francis hanging from her balcony.
Diaz, who along with about 30 family members secured tickets for Wednesday’s Mass, welcomed Francis’ calls for Mexicans not to tolerate corruption and violence.
“He’s telling us to get out of the trenches, not to close ourselves off,” she said.
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Associated Press writers Peter Orsi in Mexico City and Astrid Galvan in El Paso, Texas, contributed to this report.
Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman reported this story in Ciudad Juarez and Peter Orsi reported from Mexico City. AP writers Nicole Winfield in Ciudad Juarez, E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City and Astrid Galvan in El Paso, Texas, contributed to this report.
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Nicole Winfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nwinfield
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
