Massive Flash Mob performed for Pope Francis

http://en.romereports.com Millions of pilgrims took part in the world's largest flash mob, by performing a simple dance for the Pope. In fact, the title of the song they danced to is called 'Francis.'...

In his vigil address on Saturday, the Pope urged the pilgrims not to be "part-time Christians", but to lead full, meaningful lives. Speaking on a huge stage at the beach where a mock church structure was built, Pope Francis referred to the street protests which have been taking place in Brazil for more than a month. "The young people in the street are the ones who want to be actors of change. Please don't let others be actors of change," he told the crowd at the vigil. "Keep overcoming apathy and offering a Christian response to the social and political concerns taking place in different parts of the world." "Jesus offers us something bigger than the World Cup!" Francis said, drawing cheers from the crowd in this soccer-mad nation."

Also on Saturday, the Pope repeated his challenge to fellow Roman Catholic clerics to take to the streets. In a speech to 1,000 bishops and clerics in Rio's cathedral, he said they should go to the favelas - Brazil's shanty towns. “We cannot keep ourselves shut up in parishes, in our communities, when so many people are waiting for the Gospel," he told the audience. Crowds chanted "Long lives the Pope" and threw gifts, including football jerseys, when he arrived for Sunday's Mass. Nearly the entire 2.5 mile crescent of the broad beach overflowed with people, some of them taking an early morning dip in the Atlantic and others tossing t-shirts, flags and soccer jerseys into the pontiff's open-sided car as he drove by. Francis worked the crowd, kissing babies, taking a sip of mate tea handed up to him and catching gifts on the fly. Even the normally stern-faced Vatican bodyguards let smiles slip as they jogged alongside his car, caught up in the enthusiasm of the crowd. "We were dying of cold but it was worth it," said Lucrecia Grillera, an 18-year-old from Cordoba, Argentina, where Francis lived for a time before becoming pope. "It was a tiring day, but it was a great experience."

"It was such an excellent week, everybody was in such good spirit, you could just feel a sense of peace," said Denise da Silva, a Rio de Janeiro Catholic who was sitting alone on the beach Sunday morning, a Brazilian flag painted on her face. "I have never seen something here in Rio so marvelous as what we have just lived."

In the longest and most important speech of his four-month pontificate, Francis took a direct swipe at the "intellectual" message of the church that so characterized the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Speaking to Brazil's bishops, he said ordinary Catholics simply don't understand such lofty ideas and need to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness and mercy that is at the core of the Catholic faith.

"At times we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people," he said. "Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery."

In a speech outlining the kind of church he wants, Francis asked bishops to reflect on why hundreds of thousands of Catholics have left the church for Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have grown exponentially in recent decades in Brazil, particularly in its slums or favelas, where their charismatic message and nuts-and-bolts advice is welcome by the poor. Pope Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for the "exodus" of Catholic faithful from the church. "Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas," he said. "Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age." Francis asked if the church today can still "warm the hearts" of its faithful with priests who take time to listen to their problems and remain close to them. “We need a church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy," he said. "Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of 'wounded' persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love." After Sunday's Mass, Francis was meeting with the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as holding a thank-you audience with some of the 60,000 volunteers who organized the youth festival. He was leaving for Rome Sunday night.