Pope Francis: in Cuba there was no mediation, but “good will”

“Also, I carry you in my heart and pray for you and for your country”, were the words the pontiff uttered to the assembled throng at the close of the Mass.

It is this Old Testament-like rhetoric that some find jarring, perhaps especially so in the United States, where Francis will visit in September.

After the speeches that evening, the pope and the invited dignitaries were treated to a concert.

While celebrating Mass on Saturday in Caacupe, Francis lauded the strength and religious fervor of Paraguayan women while visiting the country’s most important pilgrimage site.

His way of surviving the gruelling tour of the continent was to sip mate tea, a caffeine-rich infusion which is popular in his native Argentina, he said.

The Metropolitan Cathedral is illuminated in the colors of the Paraguayan flag during evening prayers with Pope Francis in Asuncion, Paraguay.

“They came from all over Paraguay and tens of thousands from neighbouring Argentina, the pope’s home country, too”, she said.

At Bolivia’s notorious Palmasola prison July 10, it was clear prisoners saw him as a powerful advocate who could help pressure the government to speed up the nation’s judicial process, improve prison conditions and put an end to practices that they said amounted to buying and selling justice.

After a visit that also included Ecuador and Bolivia, the Airbus A-330 carrying the Pope and the Vatican’s delegation took off in the evening from Paraguay’s capital Asuncion.

Pope Francis has dedicated his papacy to the plight of the poor and delivered severe critiques of economic systems that benefit the rich. But flying back to Rome from his eight-day visit to Latin America, Pope Francis admitted he had overlooked a group.

Then he outlined his vision of the church: “Welcoming those who do not think as we do, who do not have faith or who have lost it”.

Pope Francis has been all over the map with when it comes to the LGBT community-first saying gays and lesbians had “gifts” to offer Catholics, then pulling a 360 and declaring same-sex relationships were a “threat” to the traditional family.

“Corruption is the plague, it’s the gangrene of society”, he said during a mostly improvised speech at Saturday’s rally, attended by Cartes.

If I don’t work, said Fernandez, the household doesn’t eat. In it, he called for radical action on the part of the world’s leaders and publics to take the necessary political and economic action to prevent the terminal deterioration of the world’s ecosystems-an event many scientists believe would kill enormous numbers of people. Residents argue that they have worked to make the land habitable. But Morales had given them to the Pope with “such goodwill” and such obvious pleasure at doing something he thought would please the Pope that Francis said he could not refuse.

So Francis said he was correcting himself. One of them read: “Yes to life, no to drugs, fight for change”.

Jobs are a right and bestow dignity, he said.

“All these critiques point toward the incoherence of the simple idea of free-market economics, but they don’t prescribe a remedy”, said Johnson, of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.