‘Go out into the world,’ Pope tells priests at St John Paul II shrine

Pope Francis is encouraging his churchmen to leave their comfort zones and tend to the needy on the peripheries.

He issued the call as he celebrated a Mass in a shrine in Poland dedicated to the late Polish pope, St John Paul II on Saturday.

During Mass, the Pope said that Jesus wanted his Church “to be a Church on the move, a Church that goes out into the world.”

He delivered his words in a large modern church, the Sanctuary of St John Paul II, in Kraków.

He said that Jesus’s call to his disciples to minister to the world is also relevant today to churchmen and women.

Francis said: “This call is also addressed to us. How can we fail to hear its echo in the great appeal of St John Paul II: ‘Open the doors’?”

Meanwhile, Vatican spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi said Pope Francis has met with a child without legs for whom he bought artificial limbs.

Fr Lombardi told reporters that the meeting took place on Saturday in Kraków during the Pope’s five-day pilgrimage to Poland.

The spokesman added that Francis was arriving at the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Krakow on Saturday when we met with the girl who had been fitted with prosthetic limbs that he had paid for.

For the full text of the Pope’s homily at the St John Paul II shrine go here.