Pope Francis AP FILE PHOTO
VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis baptized 33 infants at the Sistine Chapel and prayed the Angelus Sunday noon before a crowd of pilgrims on St. Peter’s Square ahead of his visit this week to the Philippines, Asia’s most populous Christian country.
“Filipinos are eager to welcome Pope Francis,” said Mercedes Tuason, Philippine ambassador to the Vatican. “He will surely get a very warm welcome.”
Fr. Gregory Gaston, rector of the Pontifical Philippine College, said the Pope would surely be “mobbed” by Filipinos.
Tuason herself will fly to Manila on Tuesday to welcome the Pope when his plane lands late Thursday afternoon at Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
State ceremonies led by President Aquino will be held the following morning.
Before coming to the Philippines, the Pope will visit Sri Lanka on Jan. 13-15.
The Pope will be received by new Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who was sworn into office on Friday after Mahinda Rajapakasa quickly conceded defeat in the snap election Thursday.
The visit on Jan. 15-19 is the first papal visit by a Pope to the Philippines in 20 years so that papal fever has gripped the country where at least 80 percent of the nearly 100 million population are Catholics.
The Philippines is the world’s third-biggest Catholic country in the world, after Brazil and Mexico.
According to the Protestant historian of Christianity Martin Marty, more Catholics are baptized each year in the Philippines than all of Latin Europe.
Observing a papal tradition on Sunday, the feast of the Baptism of Jesus, Pope Francis christened 33 infants—12 males and 21 females, mostly children of Vatican employees.
The feast of Christ’s baptism officially closes the long Christmas season in the liturgical calendar of the Church.
Pouring water over their heads, Pope Francis officially welcomed the infants as new members of the Church beneath Michelangelo’s brilliant frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.
It is the same chapel where in the papal conclave of 2013, Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope, and christened himself Francis.
The Pope later led the prayer of the Angelus at noon from his balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
In what may be a prescient turn of events, the Pope on Saturday addressed a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of the earthquake that struck Haiti ahead of the 5.7-magnitude earthquake that hit Luzon early Sunday.
The meeting was convened by the Pontifical Council for Latin America and the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” which funded the construction of the Pope Francis Center for the Poor in Tacloban City. Francis himself will inaugurate the center on Jan. 17.
The conference, “The Communion of the Church: Memory and Hope for Haiti, 5 Years After the Earthquake,” discussed continuing relief and reconstruction efforts on the island.
The Pope said the reconstruction of Haiti had “three solid pillars: the human person, ecclesial communion, and the local Church.”
The theme of his Philippine visit is “Mercy and Compassion.”
On Jan. 17, the Pope will say a Mass in Tacloban, ground zero for Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan), which killed more than 7,300 people and rendered at least 4 million people homeless.
The Pope will have lunch with 30 survivors of the typhoon and the earthquake that struck Bohol only three weeks earlier, killing more than 200 people.
Shortly after the typhoon struck, the Pope tweeted, “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims … especially for those in the beloved islands of the Philippines.”
Sean Patrick Lovett of Radio Vaticana said the Pope would go to Leyte “to see for himself [what happened] in Tacloban and Palo and to be close to the people, to experience their suffering and to show them himself the Church’s mercy and compassion.”