Pope Francis urges flock to ‘be young at heart’

The square overflowed with some 250,000 pilgrims, tourists and locals eager to join the new Pope at ceremonies marking the start of Holy Week, which culminates in Easter.

Keeping with his spontaneous style, the first Pope from Latin America broke away several times from the text of his prepared homily to encourage the faithful to lead simple lives.

At the end of the two-hour Mass, Francis took off his red vestments, leaving only the white cassock and skull cap, and climbed into an open-topped popemobile to circle through the enthusiastic crowd.

He leaned out to shake hands, kissed and patted the heads of infants passed to him by bodyguards, and often gave children the thumbs-up sign.

His security detail seemed to be reluctantly dealing with this get-close-to-the-people pontiff, scrambling around the vehicle to pick up this child or that one.

At one point, his chief bodyguard, Domenico Giani, was seen to relax into a smile after being sent back to the mother of a child he had greeted to convey a message from the pontiff.

Francis even climbed down from the vehicle, kissed a woman in the crowd and chatted briefly with her, and another man in the crowd leaned over a barrier to squeeze the pontiff on a shoulder – an unheard of familiarity in the pontificate of the reserved Benedict XVI.

During the mass, Pope Francis also told a story from his childhood in Argentina.

Since his election on 13 March, Francis has put the poor at the centre of his mission as Pope, keeping with the priorities of his Jesuit tradition. His name was inspired by St Francis of Assisi, who renounced a life of high-living for poverty and simplicity to preach Jesus’s message to the poor.

Francis wore 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.

In his homily, Pope 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 was inspired by Christian joy, said the 76-year-old pontiff.

Francis said he was looking forward to welcoming young people to Rio de Janiero in July for the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day – the first foreign trip so far on the calendar of the new papacy.

“There is no doubt that there will be a new spring for the church, a renewal” with this Pope, said Sister Emma, an Argentine nun in the crowd.

Holy Week will see at least one break from tradition. Instead of washing priests’ feet in a symbolic gesture of humility on Holy Thursday, Francis will wash the feet of inmates at a juvenile detention centre in Rome. Other appointments in public will include the Way of the Cross procession at the Colosseum on Good Friday night. On Sunday, the Pope will celebrate Easter Mass in the square.

At the end of yesterday’s service, Francis delivered greetings in French, English and German.