{"id":25190,"date":"2019-01-28T13:29:02","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T18:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/panamaadvisoryinternationalgroup.com\/blog\/?p=25190"},"modified":"2019-01-30T10:17:52","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T15:17:52","slug":"pope-winds-panama-global-youth-gathering-big-outdoor-mass-read-httpswww-channelnewsasia-comnewsworldpope-winds-panama-global-youth-gathering-big-outdoor-mass-11173438","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panamaadvisoryinternationalgroup.com\/blog\/pope-winds-panama-global-youth-gathering-big-outdoor-mass-read-httpswww-channelnewsasia-comnewsworldpope-winds-panama-global-youth-gathering-big-outdoor-mass-11173438\/","title":{"rendered":"Pope winds up Panama global youth gathering with big outdoor Mass"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Pope Francis said an open-air Mass before a huge crowd on Sunday to wrap up a jamboree of Catholic youth, the last big event before he returns to Rome to prepare for a historic trip to the Arabian Peninsula in one week.<\/p>\n

Organizers said about 700,000 people attended the closing Mass of World Youth Day, which takes place in a different city every three years. The next jamboree, which has been dubbed the “Catholic Woodstock,” will be in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2022.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Many of the young people in the crowd spent the night on the fields of a park named after Pope John Paul, who was the last pontiff to visit Panama, in 1983.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

In his closing homily at the Mass, which started unusually early at 8 a.m., because of the sweltering tropical heat, Francis urged the young people to work against “fear and exclusion, speculation and manipulation.”<\/p>\n

After a week at the Vatican, Francis leaves on Sunday for a three-day trip to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where he will become the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula and say the first Mass in a public venue there. There are about one million Roman Catholics in the UAE, all of them expatriate workers.<\/p>\n

The freedom to practice Christianity \u2014 or any religion other than Islam \u2014 is not a given in the Gulf and varies from country to country. In the UAE and Kuwait, Christians may worship in churches or church compounds and in other places with special licenses. Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites, bans the practice of other religions.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n