Pope Francis is taking his "church for the poor" to three of South America's poorest and most peripheral countries, making a grueling, week-long trip that will showcase the pope at his unpredictable best: speaking his native Spanish on his home turf about issues closest to his heart.
Indigenous peoples will take center stage during much of Francis' July 5-13 visit to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay, while the Francis' own Jesuit order will be in the spotlight for its role in evangelizing the continent centuries ago and even today.
Environmental concerns in the Amazon, border conflicts and the region's tortured history with authoritarian regimes also factor into the agenda as history's first Latin American pope returns to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time since he was elected two years ago.
"He knows this reality, because he worked so long with the bishops of Latin America and as head of the Jesuits in Argentina," said Daniel Gussmann, director of the Catholic Church's Caritas charity in Buenos Aires. "He knows these countries, and their problems with poverty and where much of the population has no access to land."
Francis will meet with the elderly poor in Ecuador, visit Bolivia's notoriously violent Palmasola prison and tour Paraguay's flood-prone Banado Norte shantytown, bringing a message of solidarity and hope to society's most marginalized.
He'll also preside over a meeting of grass-roots groups representing indigenous peoples, campesinos and the "cartoneros" who pick through garbage for recyclable goods the last a group he long ministered to while working in the slums of Buenos Aires as archbishop.
When the Vatican hosted these grass-roots groups at the Vatican last year, Francis delivered an off-the-cuff, mini-encyclical on the rights of the poor, the injustices of unemployment and the need to care for God's creation themes he'll likely repeat next week. He insisted then that he wasn't preaching communism but the Gospel.
"Francis comes not to protect the church but to protect the poor and the Earth," said Michael Lee, associate professor of theology and Latin American studies at Fordham University.
He said that represents a different focus from the concerns of his two predecessors, who on trips to the Americas focused more on the survival of the church facing a sometimes hostile and secular agenda and competition from other religious movements.
"That's an enormous shift, and one that's going to be very well received in these countries and by these people," he said.
