GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — Hundreds of thousands of people filled a park in Ecuador’s main port city Monday for Pope Francis’ first big event of his three-nation South American tour, hoping for a glimpse of Latin America’s first pope returning to his home soil for a Mass dedicated to the family.
Many pilgrims spent the night outdoors, and some walked for miles to reach the park on Guayaquil’s northern outskirts where the crowd sang hymns and sought pockets of shade to keep cool amid the scorching sun and high humidity. Firefighters sprayed them with water hoses to provide relief.
“I’m tired. I’m hungry, I haven’t slept but I’m also full of emotion and joy in my heart,” said Vicente Huilcatoma, a 47-year-old retired police officer who walked 25 miles (40 kilometers) to reach Samanes Park.
The Vatican had originally estimated more than 1 million people would turn out for the Mass, and government organizers put the crowd at above 1 million people in the hour before the service began. But Gabriel Almeida, the government spokesman at the scene, rolled back the estimate to several hundred thousand after officials viewed aerial images of the area.
Across the park, Ecuadoran national flags and papal banners waved above the enormous sea of people, who were divided into quadrants that Francis looped around slowly on his popemobile to cheers of “Francisco! Francisco!”
In his homily, Francis praised families as the bedrock of society — “the nearest hospital, the first school for the young, the best home for the elderly” — and said miracles are performed every day inside a family out of love. But he said sometimes the love and happiness runs out.
“How many women, sad and lonely, wonder when love left, when it slipped away from their lives?” he asked. “How many elderly people feel left out of family celebrations, cast aside and longing each day for a little love?”
Francis has dedicated the first two years of his pontificate to family issues, giving weekly catechism lessons on different aspects of family life and inviting the entire church to study ways to provide better pastoral care for Catholic families, people who are divorced, gays and families in “nontraditional” situations.
A preliminary meeting of bishops on these issues ended last year in bitter divisions between liberals and conservatives, particularly over ministering to gays and to Catholics who divorce and remarry outside of the church. Church teaching holds that Catholics who enter into a second marriage without having the first one annulled cannot receive Communion.
In his homily Monday, Francis said he hoped the second meeting of bishops on family life, scheduled for October, would come up with “concrete solutions to the many difficult and significant challenges facing families in our time.”
“I ask you to pray fervently for this intention, so that Christ can take even what might seem to us impure, scandalous or threatening, and turn it … into a miracle.”
“Families today need miracles!” he added.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis wasn’t referring to the gay or divorce issue specifically but was making a more general reference that he hoped the bishops would “help the church chart this path of leaving a situation of sin to one of grace.”
On his arrival in Guayaquil, the pontiff allowed several acolytes on the tarmac to take selfies with him. He then headed to the Shrine of the Divine Mercy, where 2,000 invitees gathered including child cancer patients, residents of homes for the elderly abandoned by their families and some of Guayaquil’s poorest people.
He told those gathered that he would pray for them “and I won’t charge you a thing. All I ask, please, is that you pray for me.”
The crowd in Los Samanes park was festive, with young and old overjoyed at seeing the first pope in their lives.
“I’ll ask the pope to intercede so that God gives me my health,” said 90-year-old Guillermina Aveiga Davila, who arrived at dawn from the coastal city of Chone, some 300 kilometers (about 185 miles) away. “I want to reach 100.”
After the open-air Mass, a private lunch was planned with a group of Jesuits.
A highlight was to be a reunion with the Rev. Francisco Cortes, a priest affectionately known as “Padre Paquito,” to whom the Argentina-born pope, then the Rev. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, entrusted his seminarians on study trips to Ecuador years ago.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Cortes couldn’t fathom that Bergoglio remembered him, much less made a point of coming to have lunch.
“I don’t know what to ask him,” the soon-to-be 91-year-old Cortes said. “He said he wanted to see me and I’m amazed that he’s coming. For the first time, I have known a pope.
The “pope of the poor” returned to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time as pontiff Sunday, stressing the importance of protecting the needy and the environment from exploitation and — in a nation whose president was booed as his vehicle followed the papal motorcade Sunday — to foster dialogue among all sectors of society. It’s a message he’s expected to repeat during his next stops in Bolivia and Paraguay, South America’s two poorest countries.
Francis’ only other trip back to Latin America since being elected pope was in 2013, when he visited Brazil, where Portuguese is the main language.
Francis’ environmental message — from a pope who last month issued a treatise staking the Earth’s preservation as a core mission for humanity — is particularly relevant for Ecuador, a Pacific nation that is home to one of the world’s most species-diverse ecosystems but is also an OPEC country heavily dependent on oil. High crude prices allowed Correa to lift 1.3 million people out of poverty in his eight years in office.
But now that prices have fallen, the generous social safety net Correa has woven is threatened. He’s had to cut government spending and been buffeted for nearly a month by the most serious anti-government street protests of his tenure.
Along Francis’ motorcade route, the crowds alternated chants of adulation for the pontiff with jeers of “Correa out!” when the president’s entourage followed.
Correa also has angered environmentalists and the nation’s main indigenous group, CONAIE, by moving forward with oil drilling and mining projects in pristine Amazon forests.
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