Pope visits Milan housing project; urges compassion for poor
MILAN — Pope Francis focused his one-day visit Saturday to the wealthy northern Italian city of Milan on those marginalized by society, visiting families in a housing project and exhorting clergy and nuns to minister to the peripheries.
The papal itinerary, which also included lunch with inmates at the city’s main prison, underscored Francis’ view that the neglected outskirts of cities offer a better view of reality than their well-tended and prosperous centres.
The pope told thousands of faithful assembled at the housing project that it was important for the Roman Catholic Church “not to remain in the centre to wait, but to go toward everyone, in the peripheries, to go toward also non-Christians and non-believers.”
And later in the heart of Milan at the grand, Gothic-era Duomo Cathedral, he urged priests, nuns and deacons to take their mission to the peripheries “to rekindle hope that has been put out and sapped by a society that has become insensitive to the pain of others.”