Pope Francis was set to meet with his bishops and a group of inmates at a Pennsylvania prison on Sunday before saying Mass for an expected crowd of 1.5 million people on the final day of his historic visit to the United States.
The first Latin American pope has focused his first U.S. trip on immigration, urging Americans to lay aside their “hostility” to newcomers and addressing adoring crowds of Latino Catholics in his native Spanish.
“You bring many gifts to your new nation. You should never be ashamed of your traditions,” the 78-year-old bishop of Rome told a crowd on Saturday in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, speaking from the podium that President Abraham Lincoln used to deliver the Gettysburg Address at the height of the U.S. Civil War, which led to the end of slavery.
Francis, who has emphasized humility and service over pomp and circumstance since being elected pope two years ago, will begin his day meeting with U.S. bishops at a local seminary before traveling to Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, where inmates made the hand-carved wooden chair he will use during the day’s closing Mass.
That open-air mass will take place under a tight security curtain. There is a heavy police presence around Philadelphia, with large stretches of downtown closed to vehicle traffic and pedestrians entering a 1.6 mile (2.6 km) corridor subject to search.
The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church has met crowds at each step of his six-day U.S. visit, which included the first-ever papal address to Congress and a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York before his arrival in Philadelphia on Saturday.
-REUTERS
