Pope Scolds Over-Exuberant Pilgrim After He Makes Him Fall Over Child

Pope Francis lost his temper with a member of the crowd during his visit to Morelia, Mexico, yesterday, after the enthusiastic pilgrim pulled the Holy Father towards him, causing the Pope to fall over a child in front of him.

The Pope, who was handing out rosaries to the crowd at the time, showed visible frustration and scolded the person who is out of shot, saying in Spanish, “Please! What is happening to you? Don’t be selfish! Don’t be selfish!”.

The Vatican’s Spanish language media attaché, Father Manuel Dorantes, tweeted that the Pope’s reaction was “completely understandable” given the circumstances, while one of the Pope’s closest advisors, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, tweeted that what struck him most about the video was his "caress of the child” who he had been pushed into. He said the firmness of the Pope's reaction in telling the person not to be so selfish was “like a father”.

In his homily at yesterday's Mass for priests, religious and seminarians in Morelia, a center of drug-related violence in Mexico, the Holy Father reminded those present that the devil “can overcome us with one of his favorite weapons: resignation.”

It’s a kind of resignation “which paralyzes us and prevents us not only from walking, but also from making the journey; a resignation which not only terrifies us, but which also entrenches us in our “sacristies” and false securities,” he said.

It is a resignation “which not only prevents us from proclaiming, but also inhibits our giving praise and takes away the joy, the joy of giving praise. A resignation which not only hinders our looking to the future, but also stifles our desire to take risks and to change.”

“And so, “Our Father, lead us not into temptation’,” the Pope added. “How good it is for us to tap into our memories when we are tempted. How much it helps us to look at the “stuff” of which we are made. It did not all begin with us, nor will it all end with us, and so it does us good to look back at our past experiences which have brought us to the present.”

Resignation, he said, is a temptation that can “come to us from places often dominated by violence, corruption, drug trafficking, disregard for human dignity, and indifference in the face of suffering and vulnerability.”

And he said it is a temptation that we can “suffer over and over again – we who are called to the consecrated life, to the presbyterate, to the episcopate.”

He closed by calling on the Lord not to “lead us not into the temptation of falling into sloth, lead us not into the temptation of losing our memory, lead us not into the temptation of forgetting our elders who taught us by their lives to say, ‘Our Father’.”

Today, the last day of the Holy Father's visit to Mexico, the Pope will visit Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican border town next to El Paso, Texas, where he will celebrate Mass. 

Video h/t Aleteia