Spread Gospel in ‘Streets, Plazas,’ Pope Tells Mexico

As many as 1 million faithful took over a dusty racetrack here Sunday to listen to Pope John Paul II’s call that they spread the gospel “in the streets and plazas, in the valleys and mountains” of the world’s second-most-populous Roman Catholic nation.

“Don’t let the light of faith go out!” he urged them. “Mexico will continue to need it to build a more just and fraternal society.”

A day after his landmark appeal for a “new evangelization” of the Americas, delivered to 500 bishops from across the hemisphere, John Paul took a further step: He invited young men to “be as the apostles, fishers of men,” and join Mexico’s understaffed Catholic clergy.

The crowd at the pope’s Mass, the largest of his four-day visit to Mexico City, stretched nearly a mile from the altar. Thousands at the back viewed the spectacle through cardboard periscopes, while others waved postcard-sized portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint.

Organizers said the fenced-in racecourse, where U2 and the Rolling Stones filled only a fraction of the space with rock fans last year, was jammed with 700,000 or more Catholics. From throughout Mexico they began gathering late last week and shivered through nights as cold as 23 degrees.

Perched in trees or standing on companions’ shoulders, scores of thousands more listened to the Mass on Sunday over loudspeakers outside. Priests and others who fanned out into the multitude served Communion through gaps in the chain-link fence.

The size and fervor of the crowd was testimony to the 78-year-old pontiff’s lingering spell over Mexico’s 90 million Catholics--a flock second only to Brazil’s--despite a sharp decline in his health since previous visits.

“Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo, rah, rah, rah!” they chanted, just as they did in January 1979 when the vigorous new pope barnstormed across Mexico three months after his election.

The pope is now frail, stooped and shaky with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. At a gathering of foreign diplomats Saturday, he slurred his words and stopped several times to correct errors in his reading from a prepared text. Rather than climb stairs Sunday, he rode an elevator to the altar.

John Paul, who has been hospitalized five times during his papacy, ministered to AIDS patients and others at a hospital later Sunday as an aide read the pontiff’s reflections: “Why do we suffer? For what do we suffer? Does the fact that people suffer have significance? Can the experience of physical or moral pain be positive?

“Without doubt,” the written statement continued, “each one of us has asked these questions more than once--from the sickbed, in times of convalescence, before surgery or after seeing a loved one suffer.”

John Paul’s own suffering seemed to give only more credibility to his message.

“His voice is failing and his body is tired, but that makes his example even more powerful,” said Estefana Nevarez, 26, one of 6,000 crowd-control volunteers at the Mass wearing jackets bearing the slogan “A millennium is born; reaffirm the faith.”

Nevarez had endured a night with little food and water on the cold racetrack amid overflowing portable toilets and mounds of trash. As the sun rose, she and others kept warm by dancing, jumping in place and clapping to music.

“The Holy Father is an inspiration,” she said. “He struggles to do what he does, and that reminds us that we have our arms, our legs, our youth. He pushes us to bigger sacrifices.”

The pope aimed his homily exclusively at Mexico, urging Catholics to ignore “fallacious and novel ideologies” of Protestant evangelical sects that are making rapid headway in the country.

Without referring to the government’s conflict with indigenous guerrillas in Chiapas state, he demanded respect for the human rights of Indians, ethnic minorities and the poor. And he reiterated the church’s ban on abortion in the face of efforts to legalize it in some cases.

It was left to Cardinal Norberto Rivera, archbishop of Mexico City, to issue a sharper critique of government corruption and free-market prescriptions that, in his words, have left Mexico “deceived, invaded by poverty and undermined by violence and foreign models of life.”

Rivera’s remarks at the Mass were aimed at President Ernesto Zedillo, a Yale-trained economist. Zedillo welcomed the pope Friday by asserting that Mexico’s “spiritual wealth strengthens the people’s perseverance” to endure government reforms that will “diminish inequalities.”

The cardinal welcomed the ailing pontiff as a man with a cure. “Mexico,” he said Sunday, “longs for the intervention of a divine medic.”

Rather than dwell on politics, John Paul stuck to his evangelizing theme, saying that because temporal rulers often undervalue human dignity and freedom, “Christians have to be the ‘soul’ of this world.” He added: “The church needs more evangelizers” from across the Americas and “especially this beloved nation.”