News Digest

Sunday service: Pope celebrates mass with 6 million in Manila

Pope Francis said a huge open-air Mass for a rain-drenched crowd of millions in the Philippine capital on Sunday. City officials said 4 million people were in Manila’s Rizal Park and 2 million more in surrounding areas to witness the event that caps Francis’s week-long trip to Asia. The 78-year-old pontiff thrilled crowds on his way to the venue by travelling in a “popemobile” styled after the Philippines’ iconic minibuses known as jeepneys. The Pope’s last full day in the Philippines began with an emotional youth gathering at a Catholic university in Manila, where he was moved by a question posed by a 12-year-old girl who had been abandoned.

Many children are abandoned by their parents. Many of them became victims and bad things have happened to them, like drug addiction and prostitution. Why does God allow this to happen, even if the children are not at fault? Why is it that only a few people help us?

Glyzelle Iris Palomar, 12, asked Pope Francis

The Pope hugged her and later put aside most of his own prepared speech to respond. “She is the only one who has put forward a question for which there is no answer and she was not even able to express it in words but rather in tears,” he said, visibly moved. “Why do children suffer?” the Argentine Pope said, speaking in his native Spanish. An aide translated his words into English for the crowd of about 30,000 young people on the grounds of the Church-run university.

I invite each one of you to ask yourselves, ‘Have I learned how to weep … when I see a hungry child, a child on the street who uses drugs, a homeless child, an abandoned child, an abused child, a child that society uses as a slave’?

Pope Francis