The Pope has shown a rare sign of anger during his trip to Mexico after an eager crowd tugged his arms and caused him to topple over. Francis was at a stadium in the western city of Morella on Tuesday greeting fans when one person pulled at his robe and caused him to crash down into a wheelchair-bound man.
The Pontiff recovered and kissed the man on the head, but did not hide his irritation.
The head of the Catholic Church yelled: ‘No seas egoísta. Qué te pasó, no seas egoísta’, which translates to ‘Don’t be selfish, don’t be selfish.’
Francis took a couple of steps back as appeals came over the public address system asking the crowd not to clump together.
The pontiff continued to wave to people a few minutes more before leaving again.
During the trip, Pope Francis has urged Mexico’s young people to resist the lure of easy money from drug dealers and to instead build up their communities by valuing themselves as the wealth of the country.
Francis sought to offer a message of hope and encouragement to the next generation during a youth pep rally Tuesday in the state of Michoacan, which is a hotspot in Mexico’s drug trade.
Francis said he understood it was difficult to feel one’s worth when, in his words, ‘you are continually exposed to the loss of friends or relatives at the hands of the drug trade, of drugs themselves, of criminal organizations that sow terror.’
But, he insisted, ‘You are the wealth of Mexico.’
He arrived at the stadium full of cheering Mexican priests, nuns and seminarians for a Mass in the heart of Mexico’s drug-trafficking country.
It is home to the incredibly violent Knights Templar cartel.
Speaking to the assembled clerics, he said: ‘Faced with this reality, the devil can overcome us with one of his favorite weapons: resignation… A resignation which paralyses us and prevents us not only from walking, but also from making the journey.’
On the penultimate day of his pilgrimage he cruised through town on a (five-mile) nine-kilometer drive in his popemobile.
Thousands of people along the motorcade route waved Vatican flags and cheered wildly as he passed by.
The visit to Morelia is also tangible sign of Francis’ respect for the city’s archbishop, Alberto Suarez Inda, whom Francis made a cardinal last year.
In a country where the church hierarchy is closely tied to political and financial elite, Suarez Inda has echoed the pope’s admonition that ‘pastors should not be bureaucrats and we bishops should not have the mentality or attitude of princes.’
Michoacan has endured some of the most gruesome episodes of Mexico’s drug war, which has left 100,000 people dead or missing in the past decade.
Francis has used his five-day cross-country trip, which ends Wednesday, to press Mexican leaders to provide ‘effective security’ to their citizens.
It was just steps away from Morelia’s 17th century cathedral where two grenades blew up in a packed plaza during independence day festivities on September 15, 2008, killing eight people and injuring some 100. Drug cartels were the main suspects.
While the massacre shocked the country, the gangs mainly afflicted rural areas of Michoacan, especially the fertile lime and avocado region known as ‘Tierra Caliente’ (‘Hot Land’).
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