The new Pope began Holy Week yesterday with a sermon invoking the folk wisdom of his grandmother, further emphasising a new-look papacy that aims to be closer to the people.
Leading his first major service since his election, Pope Francis urged a vast crowd gathered for Palm Sunday to shun corruption and greed and reach out to “the humble, the poor, the forgotten”.
Departing from his prepared text and referring to wealth, he said: “You can’t take it with you, my grandmother used to say.”
Since his election on March 13, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina has broken with the more esoteric and, some would say, ostentatious style of his predecessor, Benedict, saying he wants to move the Church closer to the poor and suffering.
“Let us look around: how many wounds are inflicted upon humanity by evil!
“Wars, violence, economic conflicts that hit the weakest, greed for money, power, corruption, divisions, crimes against human life and against creation,” he said.
Pope Francis has decided to hold the Holy Thursday service this week in a juvenile jail on Rome’s outskirts rather than in the Vatican or in a Rome Basilica, where it has been held by all his predecessors in living memory.
He has also invited simple workers, such as the Vatican gardeners and street cleaners, to attend his morning daily Mass in the Vatican hotel where he is still living ahead of moving into the papal apartments in the Holy See’s Apostolic Palace.
The service, before some 250,000 people waving palm and olive branches in St Peter’s Square, gave the Pope another opportunity to stress that he wants a Catholic Church that has been dogged by scandal to be more austere and just.
Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem five days before he died.
At the end of the service, Francis was driven around the square several times in an open jeep so he could be seen by more people in the huge throng, which overflowed and stretched for blocks down to the River Tiber.
The Church today, he said, like Jesus 2,000 years ago, wanted to transmit a message of hope, “especially in the hearts of the simple, the humble, the poor, the forgotten, those who do not matter in the eyes of the world”.
After blessing palm and olive branches – both symbols of peace – Francis, wearing red and white vestments, walked to the altar on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica to conduct the outdoor Mass.
He again urged defence of the environment, speaking of “our personal sins: our failures in love and respect towards God, towards our neighbour and towards the whole of creation”.