Shapiro: Pope Francis Brings Message of Hope For All People

A delegation of 15 people from the Assembly of Civil Rights at Incarnation Catholic Church in Minneapolis are driving across the country to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia for the Pope’s visit.

Mercy Rodriguez Allen told NBC 6 that she tried to visit the Pope several years ago while vacationing in Rome, but the Pope was also on vacation at that time.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee spoke out against President Barack Obama over the commander-in-chief’s guest list for Pope Francis’ state visit. I think it will be a real shot in the arm for us as Catholics in the United States, and it will bring a new enthusiasm for our faith. Reverend Mary Lewis Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church in Southeast agreed.

“Gosar said he knows of at least one other lawmaker who would skip the pontiff’s address in protest, but he declined to say who“.

“I’m very excited”, Olson said. “I’m not a Catholic, but my Catholic friends in Oklahoma are not real pleased with it”.

Olson believes the crucial point of the Pope’s visit happens Thursday, when the Pope addresses both the Senate and House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol.

Pope Francis has been speaking out prominently about the need to take action on climate change, including by issuing an encyclical (letter to bishops) in June that called climate change “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day”. Francis has railed against the United States’ high incarceration rates in the past.

Francis’ message challenging the economic structures that oppress the working class seems to be having a wide influence in the U.S. In a recent speech to the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cupich, offered an indirect rebuke to Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, an opponent of the Illinois labor movement.

Pope Francis was a topic of discussion in a lot of local classrooms Tuesday morning.

“I think the theme that stitched our conversation together was a belief that, in politics and in life, the quality of empathy, the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes and to care for someone even if they don’t look like you or talk like you or share your philosophy – that that’s critical”, Obama explained at the time.

His chartered airplane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington after delivering the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics on his first-ever United States visit.

Asked if anyone from the Vatican had raised the issue either with the White House or with the USA delegation, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, who is traveling with the pope, e-mailed this statement to The Post: “I can only say that the invitations are in the responsibility of the White House”.

Pope Francis was also asked about his private meeting with former Cuban President Fidel Castro and specifically if he thought Castro had “repented” of having treated the Catholic Church so harshly.