Pope tells the young: ‘Don’t give up hope’

Pope Francis used his pastoral visit to Naples last weekend to encourage unemployed young people, telling them not to give up hope. Youth unemployment in Italy is around 40 per cent, with the south bearing the brunt of the economic crisis.

Visiting the impoverished and crime-torn area of Scampia during his visit Francis acknowledged: “Life in Naples has never been easy.” A local resident called Michele explained that there are fewer and fewer people in the community with a job, adding that “we need to believe in the sacredness of work”. Francis responded saying that “unemployment robs people of their dignity”. He went on: “Have the courage to travel on a road of hope, a hope that is at the core of Neapolitans’ lives, especially in their joy, their religion and their mercy.”

Earlier in the day at a Mass in the city’s Piazza Plebiscito, Francis urged the young and unemployed not to give in to temptations offered by the city’s Camorra and other criminal gangs, no matter what the hardships.

“Dear Neapolitans, don’t let anyone steal your hope!” he said. “Do not give in to the lure of easy money or dishonest income. React firmly to the organisations that exploit and corrupt the young, the poor, the weak, with the cynical drugs trade and other crimes.”

Insisting on the virtues of Naples as well as its vices, he said: “May corruption and delinquency not disfigure the face of this beautiful city.” Calling on “criminals and all their accomplices, to convert to love and justice”, Francis assured them that “it is possible to return to an honest life”.

Pope Francis has previously called on Mafia members to “convert” or face excommunication.

During the one-day visit Francis also ate lunch with 100 inmates at a prison, including 10 from a block for transsexuals, gays and the HIV-positive. He told them he recognised the difficulty for prisoners leaving jail to stay on the right path.

Francis later visited the city’s cathedral, where he was mobbed by cloistered nuns who had been given a special dispensation to meet him. The religious women abandoned protocol surrounding the Pope to give him a present, prompting Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples to joke that they were “going to eat him”.

Francis prayed with the relic of the city’s patron saint Januarius, martyred around 305. As the Pope held the ampoule the blood dissolved into a liquid. Afterwards Cardinal Sepe said it was “a sign that St Januarius loves the Pope, who is Neapolitan like us.” The Pope’s family does have Italian roots, but in the Piedmont region.

As the thousands of people watching applauded, Francis replied: “The bishop said the blood is half liquefied. It means the saint thinks we are only half converted. We must keep going so that he would love us more.”

The blood usually becomes liquid three times a year.