Sourced online from the Vatican News by Tracy Cabrera
MANILA — In what may be considered the largest event of the pontificate, Pope Leo XIV brought Spain’s bustling capital of Madrid to a halt, drawing 1.2 million people for his first public Mass in the country and a Eucharistic procession through the city.
This is the largest crowd the pope has ever encountered in his 13-month pontificate, and he took it as an opportunity to call for Catholics to live beyond a ‘comfortable, private faith’ and instead follow Jesus Christ’s teachings of love and charity.
Spanish authorities estimated that approximately 1.2 million people were in the square and surrounding streets for the Mass. The previous record for Leo’s largest event as pope was the Jubilee for Youth, where he celebrated Mass with a million young people outside Rome.
Before the Holy Mass, a Corpus Christi procession was conducted with the pontiff carrying the Eucharist through Madrid’s streets, and at the Plaza de Cibeles, Leo said that religious practice cannot remain a “comfortable, private faith.”
He prodded Spain’s faithful toward conversion marked by care for the poor and marginalized: “The Christ who processes through the streets in the monstrance is the same one who identifies with the poor, the downtrodden, those who are alone and forsaken.”
He stressed that “God is a real presence and that (people), too, are called to be present in the realities and challenges of society, not shying away, but personally committing ourselves to the building of the common good.”
“(Eucharistic processions) are not merely a matter of bringing out the monstrance, but of allowing ourselves to be brought out of our selfishness and indifference, of a comfortable, private faith, to respond to his invitation to conversion, to change our perspective, and to welcome his presence which transforms us and makes us builders of a new world,” Leo added.
He cautioned that these activities should not be “confined to wistful nostalgia” but should be considered as an invitation to build a better future.
The pope tasked Spain’s Catholics “to ensure that the religiosity which has shaped and defined this country for centuries is not a museum of the past to be visited, but a school of faith from which to draw even today.”
After the procession and during Mass, some 2,300 Eucharistic ministers descended upon the throngs to distribute communion in a massive public spectacle of faith.
The pope then descended the stage, took up the monstrance, and began to slowly walk through the barricaded streets as the faithful threw flower petals before him. Walking ahead of him were young children who had taken their first communion in the last year, dressed in their first communion attire.
ia/xf
