On Saturday, he also celebrated Mass with priests, nuns and seminarians at a shrine dedicated to St. John Paul II, the Polish pope who in 1979 urged his compatriots to oppose communism and stand up for individual freedoms.
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“Dear young people, we didn’t come into the world to “vegetate”… No, we came for another reason: To leave a mark”, the Pope said.
Cardinal Luis Tagle says that a gesture such this is a mark of papal visits such as when he went to the Philippines past year when – aside from the gift of his presence – he also gave a gift that would stay and that would benefit the poor.
“The Church has forged an alliance with the government because, using law, it can exert more control”, Jaroslaw Makowski, one of Poland’s best-known theologians and a frequent critic of the hierarchy, said before the visit.
The World Youth Day events took place amid very high security following a string of extremist attacks in Western Europe, with an elderly French priest slayed in his church the day before Francis arrived in Poland on Wednesday.
Later, in a speech, Francis called for prayers for war victims in Syria and elsewhere.
KRAKOW, Poland (AP) – Pope Francis encouraged hundreds of thousands of young people at a global gathering of the faithful Sunday to “believe in a new humanity” that is stronger than evil and refuses to see borders as barriers.
On Saturday he prayed for God to rid the world of the “devastating wave of terrorism”.
Pope Francis was speaking on the final day of his official five-day visit to Poland which included a trip to the concentration camp, Auschwitz.
The pope told reporters on the plane Sunday returning from World Youth Day in Krakow that the accusations against Cardinal George Pell, Francis’ top financial adviser, “are in the hands of justice”.
He said Europe should look closer to home, saying “terrorism. grows where the God of money is put first” and “where there are no other options”.
In a heartfelt appeal to the world’s young, he said it was up to them to fight xenophobia and “teach us how to live in diversity, in dialogue, to experience multiculturalism not as a threat, but an opportunity”.
Pope Francis challenged hundreds of thousands of young people who gathered in a sprawling Polish meadow to reject being a “couch potato” who retreats into video games and computer screens and, instead, engage in social activism and politics to create a more just world.
Francis said modern escapism into consumerism and computers isolates people.
Pope Francis has had lunch with 12 volunteers at a Catholic youth gathering in Poland.
Pope Francis, center, celebrates a Mass at the Sanctuary of St. John Paul II, in Krakow, Poland, Saturday, July 30, 2016.
There, he venerated the relics of the Polish saint and mystic, during a brief ceremony attended by some 300 people, including members of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, St. Faustina’s own order. His five-day stay focused on the World Youth Day, which is organized by the Catholic Church every two or three years.
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Lombardi says that Francis was arriving at the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Krakow on Saturday when he met with the girl who had been fitted with prosthetic limbs that he had paid for.
