Tag Archives: Pope Francis

Papal visits and large crowds

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Pope Francis visited East Timor earlier this week and many people came out to see him:

Photo by brokenadmiral_ on Pexels.com

opes are popular. So much so that nearly half the population of East Timor gathered Tuesday in a seaside park for Pope Francis’ final Mass in the small Southeast Asian country whose people are deeply Catholic…

East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, has been overwhelmingly Catholic ever since Portuguese explorers first arrived in the early 1500s and some 97% of the population today is Catholic. They turned out in droves to welcome the first pope to visit them since their independence in 2002, on the same field where St. John Paul II prayed in 1989 during the nation’s fight to separate from Indonesia.

Here is how this crowd compares to other crowds for papal visits:

Other papal Masses have drawn millions of people in more populous countries, such as the Philippines, Brazil and Poland. But the estimated crowd of 600,000 people in East Timor was believed to represent the biggest turnout for a papal event ever in terms of the proportion of the population…

While the East Timor gathering stands out, experts caution against relying on crowd counts that cannot be independently verified. The Vatican communicates crowd estimates that come from local organizers — who have an interest in overestimating the popularity of the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Crowd counting can be a tricky process. Does it get more difficult if it is a religious crowd as opposed to another kind of crowd?

More broadly, is the experience of a religious large crowd different? It is a unique experience to be crowds of hundreds of thousands of people or more. It does not happen often. The crowd can have a collective experience that is hard for individuals to have on their own. Such a crowd can help produce change or sentiment.

The Pope as urban critic

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The latest encyclical from Pope Francis includes commentary on large cities in the third world:

One of the most intriguing aspects of the pope’s new encyclical on climate change is its commentary on the rapid growth of cities in the developing world, a phenomenon the pontiff lacerates as dehumanizing.

Early in the document, the pope observes: “Neighborhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.”

He blasts “green” neighborhoods that are open to the privileged, not the poor. “Frequently,” he writes, “we find beautiful and carefully manicured green spaces in so-called ‘safer’ areas of cities, but not in the more hidden areas where the disposable of society live.”…

As if offering an alternative to the vapid isolation of the trophy skyscrapers of China and Dubai, the pope’s encyclical springs from the idea of “integral ecology,” which argues that care for the environment and the welfare of human beings are inseparable.

“When we speak of the ‘environment,'” the pope states, “what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.”

Megacities in the developing world often do have huge environmental problems – see Planet of Slums for an evocative look at the use of land and where waste goes. The Pope’s comments regarding nature and cities seem to be rooted in economic inequality. If you are wealthy, you can purchase small pieces of nature, escape harmful environmental effects (like living new power plants or polluting uses in American cities), and afford a life of consumerism where the waste you produce in a “throwaway culture” (a phrase Pope Francis has used before) is sent somewhere else. Yet, does this speak to a broader lack of interest in big cities where people are “deprived of physical contact with nature”? A more sprawling city that provides more space for nature may exacerbate economic inequalities (it can be more expensive to live near the core) as well as reduce the economics of scale that modern big cities might provide (using less land and energy per person with higher densities).