Pope Francis returns to South America

Pope Francis returned to his native South America for the first time on Sunday, beginning a swing through three of the continent’s poorest nations in an effort to highlight the plight of the world’s neediest people.
 
Francis will visit Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay but will skip his home country of Argentina, where politics are in play during a presidential election year. The Vatican is expecting crowds of up to 1 million people for Francis’s public addresses.
 
{mosads}In a video released before the trip, Francis said his message would focus on “the neediest, the elderly, the sick, those in prison and the poor, and all those who are victims of this ‘throwaway culture.’ ”
 
It’s a message Francis is likely to bring to Washington in September, when he’s scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and visit the White House as part of a U.S. tour that will also take him to New York and Philadelphia.
 
Francis has been at the center of the U.S. political debate on the environment since the release of an encyclical last month that bought wholesale into the science behind climate change and argued it’s a moral imperative for the world’s governments to act to halt the shift.
 
Francis chided “obstructionists” he says are failing in their duty to address the issue.
 
The issue could create a sticky political situation for Republicans ahead of the 2016 elections.

Most of the Republican presidential field — many of whom are Catholic — distanced themselves from Francis’s remarks on the environment, saying they get spiritual guidance from the pope, not lessons on science.