Pope visits U.S.-Mexico border city; Lubbock Councilman Hernandez travels to Juarez to see pontiff

Pope visits U.S.-Mexico border city; Lubbock Councilman Hernandez travels to Juarez to see pontiff, Greetings from Lubbock went to Pope Francis on Wednesday in his cruise to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

City Councilman Victor Hernandez went as an agent for the city, alms the pope Lubbock wines and acceding him honorary citizenship, Hernandez said. It was his aboriginal time seeing Francis, and as a Catholic, the moment was impressive.

“It was the aboriginal time seeing the pope, and possibly the alone time,” he said. “It was actual appropriate to us.”

Francis’ Mass included a political bulletin on the affair of immigration.

Francis chock-full abbreviate of calling for the U.S. to accessible its borders during a Mass acclaimed just yards from the frontier. But in his homily, beamed reside into the Sun Bowl amphitheater on the El Paso side, Francis alleged for “open hearts” and acceptance that those beat gangland executions and extortion in their homelands are victims of the affliction forms of exploitation.

“We cannot abjure the altruistic crisis which in contempo years has meant the clearing of bags of people, whether by alternation or artery or on foot, bridge hundreds of kilometers through mountains, chastening and brusque zones,” he said. “They are our brothers and sisters, who are getting expelled by abjection and violence, biologic trafficking and organized crime.”

Francis aswell accepted the plan of activists who “are on the foreground lines, generally risking their own lives” to advice those bent up in the clearing crisis. “By their actual lives, they are prophets of mercy,” he said.

And then, in a acicular message, Francis added a politically answerable greeting to the 30,000 humans aggregate in the Sun Bowl to watch the advertisement on behemothic TV screens.

“Thanks to the advice of technology, we can pray, sing and bless calm this merciful adulation which the Lord gives us, and which no borderland can anticipate us from sharing,” Francis said in Spanish. “Thank you, brothers and sisters of El Paso, for authoritative us feel like one ancestors and the aforementioned Christian community.”

Francis, a son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, had basic to cantankerous the bound in adherence with added migrants if he visited the U.S. endure fall. That wasn’t accessible for logistical reasons, so he did the next best affair on Wednesday by advancing aural a stone’s bandy of the fence to adjure and lay a boutonniere of flowers next to a ample crucifix that is to abide at the website as a cairn to his visit.

Hernandez and his wife are both accouchement of immigrants to the U.S., and he said Francis' bulletin hit home for that reason.

He and his wife both see the abuses that immigrants and their families face in abreast society, he said.

Hernandez said he was accustomed to represent Lubbock and had the befalling to accommodated some abundant humans on the trip.

While casual activists on both abandon of the bound animated the pope’s gesture, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump criticized it as a politicized and ill-informed move.

“I don’t anticipate he understands the crisis of the accessible bound that we accept with Mexico,” Trump said in an account endure anniversary with Fox television. “I anticipate Mexico got him to do it because they wish to accumulate the bound just the way it is. They’re authoritative a fortune, and we’re losing.”

He and GOP hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz accept vowed to belch all the estimated 11 actor immigrants in the U.S. illegally and body a bank forth the bound from Texas to California.

Asked to animadversion on the criticism, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope is anxious about the plight of migrants everywhere, not just in the United States.

“The pope consistently talks about clearing problems all about the world, of the duties we accept to break these problems in a accommodating manner,” Lombardi said Tuesday.

The bound Mass, acclaimed in a arenaceous acreage forth a artery that runs alongside to the Rio Grande, apparent the acute end of Francis’ five-day beat through some of Mexico’s atomic states, area drug-fueled abandon has soared acknowledgment to the abetment of badge and added accessible institutions. Francis took both abbey and accompaniment to assignment for declining their humans and apprenticed the next ancestors to abide the allurement of the biologic trade.

In a accent Wednesday to workers and employers, Francis warned that afterwards job opportunities, Mexico’s adolescence accident getting absorbed into the biologic trade. “Poverty becomes the best ancestry arena for the adolescent to abatement into the aeon of drug-trafficking and violence,” he said.

He apprenticed administration to anticipate instead of the Mexico they wish to leave for their children.

“Do you wish to leave them the anamnesis of exploitation, of bereft pay, of abode harassment?” he asked. “What air will they breathe? An air attenuated by corruption, violence, crisis and suspicion or, on the contrary, an air able of breeding alternatives, face-lifting and change?”

“God will authority today’s slave-drivers accountable,” he warned.

Francis began his final day at Bastille No. 3 in Ciudad Juarez, a city-limits already advised the annihilation basic of the world. As a bastille bandage serenaded him with their own mariachi compositions, Francis greeted a few dozen inmates who had been called for the account because of their acceptable behavior.

Looking on from the barred window of the lockup, a array of guards could be apparent watching Francis’ appointment as the that appears to smell of beginning acrylic adumbrated a last-minute spruce-up for the occasion.

Francis told 700 or so inmates aggregate alfresco the prison’s vhapel that they cannot disengage the past. But he said they accept to accept that things can change, and that they accept the achievability of “writing a new adventure and affective forward.”

Francis’ bulletin of achievement came just canicule afterwards a baleful anarchism at Monterrey’s Topo Chico prison, area battling assemblage factions bloodied one addition endure anniversary with hammers and makeshift knives. Eight added inmates were afflicted Tuesday in a affray at addition prison.

Not continued ago Juarez was busted by abandon as cartel-backed assemblage warfare fed assassination ante that hit 230 per 100,000 association in 2010. A adventurous of killings of women, abounding of them poor branch workers who just disappeared, admiring all-embracing attention.

Times accept changed, though. Endure year, the city’s assassination amount was about 20 per 100,000 people, almost on par with Mexico’s civic boilerplate of 14 per 100,000 — and able-bodied beneath accepted hotspots of biologic violence, such as the Pacific resort city-limits of Acapulco and surrounding Guerrero state.

Many businesses that bankrupt during Juarez’s darkest years accept reopened. Tourists are afresh bridge over from the United States and humans say they no best accept to leave parties aboriginal to abstain getting on the streets afterwards dark.

“At atomic now we can go out. We can airing about a little added at that time of night,” said citizen Lorena Diaz, continuing beneath a huge banderole of Francis blind from her balcony.

Diaz, who forth with about 30 ancestors associates anchored tickets for Wednesday’s Mass, accustomed Francis’ calls for Mexicans not to abide bribery and violence.

“He’s cogent us to get out of the trenches, not to abutting ourselves off,” she said.
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