Pope Francis celebrated his first Palm Sunday Mass in St Peter’s Square today by urging people to be humble and young at heart.
In keeping with his spontaneous style, he broke away several times from his prepared homily to encourage the faithful to lead simple lives.
The square overflowed with 250,000 pilgrims, tourists and Romans eager to join the new pope at the start of Holy Week ceremonies which lead up to Easter.
Pope Francis recalled Jesus’ triumphant Palm Sunday welcome into Jerusalem, saying he ‘awakened so many hopes in the heart, above all among humble, simple, poor, forgotten people, those who don’t matter in the eyes of the world’.
He then told an off-the-cuff story from his childhood in Argentina.
‘My grandmother used to say, “children, burial shrouds don’t have pockets”,’ the pope said, in a variation of ’you can’t take it with you’.
Since his election on March 13, Francis has put the downtrodden and poor at the centre of his mission as pope, keeping with the priorities of his Jesuit tradition.
His name is inspired by St Francis of Assisi, who renounced a life of high-living for austere poverty and simplicity to preach Jesus’ message to the poor.
Francis wore bright red robes over a white cassock as he presided over the Mass at an altar sheltered by a white canopy on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica.
Cardinals, many of them among the electors who chose him to be the Roman Catholic church’s first Latin American pope, sat on chairs during the ceremony held under hazy skies on a breezy day.
In his homily, Francis said Christian joy ‘isn’t born from possessing a lot of things but from having met’ Jesus. That same joy should keep people young, he said.
‘From seven to 70, the heart doesn’t age if one is inspired by Christian joy,’ said the 76-year-old pontiff.
Francis said he was joyfully looking forward to welcoming young people to Rio de Janiero in July for the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day. So far, that is the first foreign trip on the calendar of his new papacy.
The faithful knelt on hard cobblestones paving the square, and Francis knelt on a wooden kneeler at the point in the Gospel that recounts the moment of Jesus’ death.
