‘World Youth Day’ Organizers Move Gatherings, Pope Issues First Social Manifesto

When Pope Francis presided at the World Youth Day opening on Copacabana beach Thursday night, he was slowly driven through a huge pleasant crowd and eventually made stop-overs to kiss babies. The Pope even gave his white skullcap to someone who had sewn a home-made one for him and ran to the car to hand it to him, Gma news online reported.

The weather, which has been wreaking havoc on the occasion, forced the event organizers to move this weekend’s two final gatherings to Copacabana from a pasture on the outskirts of the city as it had become a vast field of mud.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis on Thursday issued his first social manifesto that calls on the rich to wipe out vast inequalities, and later received an ecstatic welcome from up to a million people on Rio’s famed Copacabana beach, the report said.

The online news added that during a visit to a Rio slum on Thursday morning, the first Latin American pope has called for a “culture of solidarity” to replace the “selfishness and individualism” in modern society.

“No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world,” The Pope has told residents of Manguinhos, a sprawling shantytown, or favela, of ramshackle brick dwellings that recently was overrun by violence and allegedly controlled by drug lords.

Report said that the Pope’s speech, under rains that have persisted throughout most of his first trip abroad as pope, came halfway through a week-long visit around World Youth Day, an international gathering of young Catholics.

Despite the downpours and unusually chilly weather, tens of thousands of jubilant Brazilians and foreign visitors have turned out to welcome the pope. The Vatican radio estimated the crowd at Copacabana at up to 1 million, report said.

The World Youth Day events are organized by the Vatican that aims to inspire Catholics during a time when rival denominations, secularism and sexual and financial scandals continue to lead some to abandon the Church.

Brazil, as among the world’s biggest population of Catholics with over 120 million faithful, is an apt locale for the pope to remind the world of inequality. A recent decade of economic growth in the country raised incomes for many, but tens of millions of Brazilians still live in poverty with little more than the basics to get by, Gma news online reported.

Sources: Gma news tv, Gma news online, Reuters