Pope’s South American Homecoming to Spotlight Poor, Environment

Pope Francis will fly to South America on Sunday for a nine-day visit in which he is likely to focus on the poor and may challenge policies on oil and gas drilling.

The first Latin American pope, who was elected in March 2013 and called for “a poor Church for the poor,” will visit three of the region’s poorest countries, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay.

During the visit, the Argentine Francis, 78, will meet prisoners, slum-dwellers and grass-roots groups representing indigenous peoples and landless peasants. He will deliver 13 speeches and six homilies to crowds likely to run into the hundreds of thousands.

Francis’s message is for God’s “children most in need, to the elderly, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, to those who are victims of this throw-away culture,” he said in a statement on the eve of the trip

On his second visit to the region as pope after a 2013 visit to Brazil, Francis is likely to echo his encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) on the environment, a letter to bishops in which he attacked political and business leaders for the impact of profit-motivated development on the environment.

Francis may speak about resource depletion, global poverty and the impact of the free-market economy on climate change, all of which featured in the encyclical.

Groups Angered

Ecuador President Rafael Correa, a former Catholic missionary, has angered indigenous and environmental groups for pushing to open the country’s Amazon rainforest to increased oil drilling and mining exploration.

A self-described socialist revolutionary, Correa invoked Francis’s call for greater equality last month when he proposed to raise taxes on inheritances and real-estate profits. Nationwide protests forced him to temporarily retract the proposals to avoid violence ahead of the visit. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales is boosting oil and gas drilling.

The pope will meet both Correa and Morales. Francis, who suffers from sciatica and had part of a lung removed in his youth, will spend just under four hours in the Bolivian capital La Paz, which is 3,650 meters high.

He may follow an ancient local tradition and drink tea brewed with coca leaves. Locals, and especially the poor, chew coca leaves partly against altitude sickness.

Asked whether Francis would resort to coca leaves, his spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters: “The pope will do what he thinks is best.” Lombardi said Francis “is happy to follow” local traditions on his trips.

bloomberg.com