Pope Francis’ six-day visit to Mexico drew huge enthusiastic crowds and wide international coverage.
He used the platform to reiterate the concerns he has addressed during his papacy. In homilies delivered in various locations across the country he spoke about inequality, immigration, prisons and criminality.
The Pontiff was greeted by waves of adoring crowds after he touched down in Mexico City on Friday, February 12 and rode ten kilometers through the streets of the capital to the nunciature, the diplomatic mission of the Holy See.
The following day, Francis met with President Enrique Peña Nieto and the First Lady at the National Palace, and later addressed government ministers, federal officials and ambassadors.
In his speech, Francis said Mexico’s leaders have a “duty” to move past corruption and violence and work for the collective good. He said he came to Mexico “as a missionary of mercy and of peace” but also as a son who wanted to pay homage to his mother, the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe.
On the afternoon of his second day in Mexico, the pope finally achieved his wish to see the Virgin, celebrating a Mass for 40,000 people at the Guadalupe shrine. Also, Francis managed to spend 15 minutes in prayer, alone with the Virgin of Guadalupe.
At a Mass in the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec, the pope addressed the country’s glaring inequalities. He denounced the “dealers of death” who exploit migrants making the journey to the United States.
In Morelia, Michoacan, a region badly hit by drug violence, Francis denounced drug cartels and violence.
“I understand that often it is difficult to feel your value when you are continually exposed to the loss of friends or relatives at the hands of the drug trade, of drugs themselves, of criminal organizations that sow terror,” Francis said.
“It is a lie to believe that the only way to live, or to be young, is to entrust oneself to drug dealers or others who do nothing but sow destruction and death,” he said. “Jesus would never ask us to be assassins; rather, he calls us to be disciples.”
The pope used his trip to Ciudad Juarez, his final destination in Mexico, to draw attention to the horrors of the Mexican prison system, which struggles with overcrowding and corruption.
At a homily at a prison in the city, which was once considered the murder capital of the world, he urged society to rethink its ideas about locking up inmates indefinitely. He called such an approach “a symptom of a culture that has stopped supporting life, of a society that has abandoned its children.”
While Francis didn’t set foot in the United States during his trip, his presence was felt in the border city of El Paso. He even paused during mass to acknowledge the crowd on the other side of the fence and the 28,000 people who had gathered to watch the event at El Paso’s Sun Bowl.
The pontiff decried the global “human tragedy” that forces people to migrate unwillingly, “each step, a journey laden with grave injustices: the enslaved, the imprisoned and extorted.”
The pope even expressed an opinion on Donald Trump, when a reporter on the papal plane back to Rome asked for his view on the Republican candidate.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” he replied.
Trump responded immediately during a campaign rally in South Carolina. “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” he said.
Before Francis arrived in Mexico, Trump told a news network that the pontiff “did not understand” border issues. “I think that the pope is a very political person.”