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Pope Francis Kicks Off Holy Week

Urges Catholics to be humble and young at heart.

Pope Francis ushered in Holy Week on Sunday with a mass in St. Peter’s Square, joined by 250,000 pilgrims, urging Catholics to be humble and young at heart—and he even shared a story from his own Argentine childhood. The first Jesuit pope—and the first from South America—Francis has already made commitment to the poor a priority since being elected on March 13. The beginning of Holy Week, Palm Sunday mass honors Jesus’s return to Jerusalem before being betrayed by Judas, and Francis urged Catholics to remember the hope Jesus’s arrival had instilled in the poor and downtrodden. He also spontaneously told a story urging a humble lifestyle from his own childhood, saying his grandmother used to say “children, burial shrouds don’t have pockets.”