The list includes all of the diocesan bishops of the nine countries from the Amazon region, as well as three from the United States.

In all three countries, Pope Francis pleaded for protection of the environment. Mining by foreign companies to extract precious minerals has been a major problem in Madagascar and Mozambique. In Madagascar, deforestation is especially a threat.

Some 40 percent of the U.S. Catholic community has a Hispanic background and that “more than 50 percent of the Catholics in the United States under the age of 18 are Hispanic.”

Rev. Gabriele Martinelli is accused of the sexual abuse of altar boys who served the papal masses in St. Peter’s Basilica and who lived in a Vatican pre-seminary in the years before 2012.

His critics know Pope Francis "will not change,” said Father Sosa, adding, “In reality, these [attacks] are a way to influence the election of the next pope.”

Pope Francis believes that Christianity and the Catholic Church can have a great future in this continent where two-thirds of humanity live.

Heading home from his trip to Africa, the pope criticized “schools of rigidity” in the church but said he welcomed criticism and did not see a U.S. schism as imminent. America’s Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell, reports.

Pope Francis encouraged the Mauritian people to support “a better division of income and the integral promotion of the poor” and “not to yield to the temptation of an idolatrous economic model that sacrifices human lives on the altar of speculation and profit alone.”

“Our young people are our foremost mission! We must invite them to find their happiness in Jesus,” the pope said at Mass for 368,000 Catholics.

Father Opeka welcomed Pope Francis to Akamasoa which, he said, “was one a zone of exclusion, suffering violence and death” but over the past 30 years “Divine Providence has created an ‘oasis of hope’ in which children have regained their dignity, young people have returned to work and their parents