Pope Decries Suffering of Mexico Poor : Religion: He visits ‘lost city’ where 700,000 live. The church wants to be the voice ‘for those who have no voice,’ he says.

Maria Ester Morales, an optimist, stared appreciatively at leaden clouds that had left the cluttered valley and its worshipful multitude awash in mud. The rain, she decided, had been nature’s gift to the Pope.

“There are only two seasons here; dust and mud,” she explained. “And the mud is dust because it just sticks to your shoes. The dust gets into everything, and it carries microbes, too, you know.”

A decade ago, spring rain in the Chalco Valley southeast of Mexico City mostly mattered only to the corn. Today, about 700,000 poor people live in rough-hewn houses along nameless earthen lanes here on the rim of the Mexican capital. Local newspapers call the gigantic slum marking the edge of the world’s largest metropolitan area “the lost city.”

On Monday, Pope John Paul II came to Chalco to assert his church’s affinity for Morales, her Chalco neighbors and their teeming millions of have-not kin in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

“Today, like yesterday, the church, excluding partisan and conflictive options, wants to be the voice of those who have no voice,” John Paul intoned in a powerful homily at a Mass for a huge, damp and awed congregation ranged before a tall yellow-and-white altar.

“About 65 of us came yesterday from Toluca and slept in the bus,” said Juan Aguilar, a 22-year-old engineering student.

“How do you describe what it is like to see the living representative of God?” asked Maria Veronica Tarango, 16, a provincial haberdasher’s daughter whose family arrived in the drizzly dawn with a five-hour wait for Mass.

John Paul arrived in a big helicopter, crisp white skirts shielded from the slick black mud by expensive government works that included a paved road for his Popemobile. The road was lined by a sentinel chain-link fence all the way to the altar.

The Pope has seen governments all over the world whitewash the unseemly for his visits, but he has also seen more, he told the people of Chalco on Monday.

“In many of you I see the face of Christ suffering: Faces of children who are the victims of poverty, abandoned, without school, without a decent home; faces of disoriented young people; faces of workers often badly paid and with difficulties in organizing themselves to defend their rights; faces of the underemployed and unemployed . . . faces of mothers and fathers anguished by the lack of means with which to sustain and educate their children. . . .”

The Pope’s voice, speaking fluent Spanish, bounced over new crosses in the young cemetery in Chalco’s next-to-last garbage dump. It reverberated through rusty water tanks, springless sedans, around hopeful young shrubs and threadbare salesmen of sweet pineapple and cheap plastic.

“I invite all Christians and all men of goodwill in Mexico to awaken a social conscience of solidarity: We cannot live and sleep peacefully while thousands of our brothers, very close to us, lack the basics with which to live a life of human dignity,” John Paul said.

The Pope’s reassertion of his church’s commitment to social justice is a theme he first elaborated in the Third World in Mexico at a meeting with Latin American bishops in Puebla on his first foreign trip in 1979.

The Chalco message, sandwiched between a private meeting with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and an afternoon service in the port of Veracruz, was the highlight of the second day of an eight-day return visit to Mexico.

Maria Ester Morales heard John Paul from the wrong side of the fence Monday; she could find no way into the ticket-only service.

Details of the papal message may have eluded her, but the mere fact that John Paul would even dream of coming to Chalco reinforced a conviction that things are getting better here.

The Morales family has a house with electricity and a television. There is a new church, and a school for her three children.

Under Salinas, the Mexican government has spent heavily to provide basic services to Chalco. Water pipes are being laid, and a neighbor told Morales that there is a health center, although nobody at the outskirts of John Paul’s Mass seemed sure exactly where it is. Some police patrol at night now, and crime is down, residents said.