Pope to young in Poland trip: Believe in a new humanity

KRAKOW, Poland (AP) — Pope Francis encouraged hundreds of thousands of young people gathered Sunday in southern Poland to “believe in a new humanity” which is stronger than evil and refuses to use borders as barriers.

His appeal came at the end of World Youth Day, a weeklong event which draws young Catholics from around the world to a different city every two to three years for a spiritual pep rally.

The youth gathering was Francis’ main focus during his pilgrimage to Poland, but over five days in this deeply Catholic nation he also prayed at the former Auschwitz death camp and implored God to keep away a devastating wave of terrorism. He also held meetings with the country’s political and church leaders.

For a second straight day, a huge crowd filled a vast field Sunday in the gentle countryside outside of Krakow for Francis, who was visiting Eastern Europe for the first time. Security was very high through the pope’s visit, coming at a time of terror attacks in Western Europe.

The faithful had camped out overnight after an evening of entertainment and prayer with the pope there that drew 1.6 million people, according World Youth Day organizers.

Sunday’s faithful numbered at least in the hundreds of thousands, similar to the number seen at the pope’s other public appearances in the past days. The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, referred to an estimate by Polish authorities of 1.5 million at Sunday’s closing Mass.

The pope used his several encounters with the young pilgrims — from mega-gatherings to a private lunch with only a dozen of them from five continents — to encourage a new generation to work for peace, reconciliation and justice.

God, said Francis in his final homily of the pilgrimage, “demands of us real courage, the courage to be more powerful than evil, by loving everyone, even our enemies.”

“People may judge you to be dreamers, because you believe in a new humanity, one that rejects hatred between peoples, one that refuses to see borders as barriers and can cherish its own traditions without being self-centered or small-minded,” Francis told his flock before him, many of them in their late teens, 20s or 30s.

Earlier in his pilgrimage, Francis had expressed dismay that many people and places aren’t welcoming to refugees or those fleeing poverty in their homelands.

As hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive in smugglers’ boats on Europe’s southern chores, some nations on the continent, notably in central and eastern Europe, have thrown up fences to keep the refugees out. Poland has been among the countries which have refused to take in many refugees, saying it has already welcomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian immigrants.

Attending Francis’ closing Mass on Sunday were some of Poland’s top leaders, including President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the conservative ruling Law and Justice party. Kaczynski is widely regarded as the most powerful figure in Poland’s politics and toes a generally pro-Catholic but anti-migrant line.

Another message that Francis countered head-on was the world of computer screens and video games, which are contributing to what he called a kind of “paralysis” among young people. He exhorted them Saturday evening not to be “couch potatoes” seeking merely convenience but to instead take risks and make a mark on the world.

The World Youth Day events took place amid very high security following a string of extremist attacks in Western Europe, with an elderly French priest slayed in his church the day before Francis arrived in Poland on Wednesday.

On Saturday, at a Mass attended mainly by Polish priests, nuns and seminarians, explosives-sniffing dogs patrolled the perimeter. Police opened every bag of those entering and waved metal-detecting wands carefully over each person.

Saturday’s vigil was a huge security challenge, since many of the hundreds of thousands slept there overnight and others kept streaming in to see the pope Sunday morning at Mass. So while the pope was sleeping at the archbishop’s residence in Krakow, Polish police vans kept arriving at the meadow and anti-terrorist police with submachine guns guarded the ways in.

At Sunday’s Mass, several Polish police vans followed the pope’s open-sided popemobile as he rode through the wide flat meadow in the middle of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Motorcycle police rode close to metal barriers keeping the crowd from the vehicle’s path.

Francis also spoke of terrorism in some of his public remarks and made an unscheduled stop Saturday at a Franciscan church in Krakow, where he implored God in prayer to “keep away the devastating wave of terrorism” in much of the world and to “touch the hearts of the terrorists so that they recognize the evil of their actions and return to the path of peace and of good.”

When the pope travels in Italy or abroad, a corps of Vatican bodyguards travels with him, running alongside his popemobile or scrutinizing crowds along the route as they speed along in the same motorcade.

Since the Paris extremist attacks in early 2015, concerns have heightened that the Vatican, and the pope in particular could be a target of an attack because of his role as influential Christian leader.

At the end of Sunday’s Mass Francis announced that the next World Youth Day will take place in Panama in 2019.

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Monika Scislowska in Krakow and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw contributed to this report.

Frances D’Emilio is on twitter at www.twitter.com/fdemilio