(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Pope Francis concluded his trip to Asia yesterday with an open-air Mass for a rain-drenched crowd in Manila that the Vatican and the government said drew up to seven million people, the largest ever for a papal event.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the office of the president told the Vatican that between six and seven million attended the Mass in Manila's Rizal Park and surrounding areas.
"We are not able to count all these people, obviously, or to verify this, but in any case, we have seen so many people that we believe that it is possible," Lombardi told a briefing.
"If this is true, and we think it is, this is the largest event in the history of the popes," he said, noting that Pope John Paul drew some five million to the same area in 1995.
The 78-year-old pope, wearing a transparent yellow poncho over his white cassock, was driven through the ecstatic crowd in a "popemobile" modified from a jeepney, the most popular mode of transport in the Philippines which is based on a US military vehicle used in the Second World War.
The pontiff, standing in the elevated open body of the uniquely Filipino version of his popemobile, travelled through the streets of the capital Manila for the main event of his five-day visit.
The rectangular vehicle with a distinctive giant grille repeatedly stopped so he could reach into the cheering masses and pick up babies to kiss and bless them.
The pope rode the jeepney popemobile to Rizal Park where millions had gathered to hear him celebrate mass, in one of the world's biggest papal gatherings.
The bodies of the jeeps were extended, seats were added and a fixed roof put in place. The vehicles were then painted with colourful and Catholic designs.
He stopped often along the route to kiss children and bless religious statues on the day the Philippines celebrates the feast of the infant Jesus. The faithful, also wearing ponchos, held up rosaries in a forest of uplifted arms as he passed by.
Some people in the capital of Asia's only predominantly Catholic country had waited all night for gates to open at dawn. The gates opened nine hours before the start of the Mass, which was due to last nearly three hours.
In his homily, the pope urged Filipinos to shun "social structures which perpetuate poverty, ignorance and corruption," a theme he stressed when he held talks with President Benigno Aquino on Friday. Aquino attended the Mass.
Francis also took another swipe at the government's population control efforts, saying the family was under threat from "insidious attacks and programmes contrary to all that we hold true and sacred."
The pope's last full day in the Philippines began with an emotional youth gathering at a Catholic university in Manila, where he was moved by a question posed by a 12-year-old girl who had been abandoned.
"I invite each one of you to ask yourselves, 'Have I learned how to weep ... when I see a hungry child, a child on the street who uses drugs, a homeless child, an abandoned child, an abused child, a child that society uses as a slave'?" he said.
Children can be seen living on the streets of the Philippine capital, as they often do in many poor Asian countries, surviving by begging and picking through garbage in vast dumps.
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