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Pope Francis arrived at a stadium full of cheering Mexican priests, nuns and seminarians for a Mass in Morelia, a hotbed of Mexico's drug trade.
In the Mass, the Pontiff urged Mexico's priests not to resign themselves to a country dominated by drug-fueled violence and corruption, but rather to be inspired to get out of their comfortable lives and fight injustice.
In his homily, Francis told priests and nuns not to be paralyzed by resignation, which he calls the devil's "favorite weapon."
He encouraged them to look instead to the model of Vasco de Quiroga, a Spanish bishop who came to New Spain in the 16th century. Vasco de Quiroga founded the first seminary and a hospital where indigenous people could go. Francis says that rather than being resigned to seeing Indians being sold and humiliated by colonizers, Vasco de Quiroga was inspired to fight the injustice around him. Indigenous called him "Tata Vasco", which means "Father Vasco" in the Purépecha language.
The visit to Morelia is a tangible sign of Francis' respect for the city's archbishop, Alberto Suárez Inda, whom Francis made a cardinal last year. In a country where the church hierarchy is closely tied to political and financial elite, Suárez Inda has echoed the pope's admonition that "pastors should not be bureaucrats and we bishops should not have the mentality or attitude of princes."
The pope fully backs Suárez Inda's pastoral program and holds him up as a model for other clerics to emulate.
The mass was also attended by Felipe Calderón, former president of Mexico.
Later in the day the Pope will visit the city's baroque cathedral before meeting with young people, a fixture of papal trips that often produces some of the most memorable and spontaneous moments. Francis will almost certainly touch on the drug problem.
Much of Michoacán is part of a region called Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Lands, known for both its blistering temperatures and brutal tactics by gangsters eager to control lucrative drug-production territory and smuggling routes.
By 2013, the pseudo-religious, evangelical-inspired Knights Templar cartel was widely kidnapping and extorting money and dominating the state's economic and political scene so much that local farmers took up arms against them. But the uprising by the vigilante-style "self-defense" forces brought little peace to the state, with the groups fighting among themselves even as new criminal gangs sprang up or tried to muscle their way into Michoacán, a big source of methamphetamine production.
This is the penultimate day of his Mexico pilgrimage.
