Standing amid a million people in a park in Quito, Ecuador commemorating South America's 200-year-old cry for independence, Pope Francis yesterday called for unity among its people and for rejection of authoritarianism, the Catholic News website reports today (July 7, 2015).
With blunt words addressed directly to the people of the continent of his birth at an open-air Mass, the Pope tied together the Christian proclamation of faith with Ecuadoreans' centuries-long struggle to stop exploitation of their resources and their very selves.
In a homily focused on Jesus' intense prayer to God on the night before His death -- when He prayed for the unity of His disciples and all they would evangelize -- Francis called for a joining together of that Christian prayer and the continuing struggle for Latin American freedom.
"I imagine these whisperings of Jesus during the Last Supper as a cry that we celebrate in this Mass," said Francis, mentioning that the celebration was being held in a park commemorating Ecuador's 1809 declaration of independence -- the first such declaration of freedom from colonial-era rule on the entire continent.
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