Raw: Mexico Cheers Pope as Visit Begins

(13 Feb 2016) RESTRICTION SUMMARY: AP CLIENTS ONLY

POOL - AP CLIENTS ONLY
Mexico City, Mexico - 13 February 2016
1. Pope's vehicle leaves residence where he is staying
2. Tight of cheering crowd
3. Pope Francis walks over to group of disabled children, gives hugs
4. Pan left on big crowd
5. Pope Francis working the crowd
6. Francis climbs back into Popemobile
7. Various of vehicle moving through streets
STORYLINE:
Tens of thousands of cheering Mexicans have gathered outside the residence where Pope Francis is staying to send him off on his first full day in Mexico: an official welcome at the presidential palace, a meeting with the country's bishops and a Mass at the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Cheers went up as Francis pulled out in his popemobile and abruptly stopped to greet elderly, sick and disabled people who had gathered outside the residence of the Vatican nuncio. He handed out rosaries to faithful in wheelchairs and embraced a young boy wearing a surgical mask.
Thousands more Mexicans are lining his motorcade route and history's first Latin American pope is basking in the welcome from the largest Spanish-speaking Catholic country in the world.
On Saturday, Francis meets with Mexican officials and foreign ambassadors at the National Palace.
The speech, which is a fixture of every papal trip, is usually the pope's most political message, and Francis is expected to touch on some of the grave problems facing Mexico stemming from drug violence, migration and poverty.
The pope also will speak to Mexico's bishops at the Cathedral of the Assumption. He is expected to urge them to be close to their people and accompany them through their hardships, amid criticism even from within the Mexican clergy that many in the church here are often highly deferential to the wealthy and powerful.
Francis wraps up his day with a Mass at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a silent prayer before the icon.
According to tradition, the Virgin appeared before the Indian peasant Juan Diego in 1531 at Tepeyac, a hillside near Mexico City where Aztecs worshipped a mother-goddess, and her image was miraculously imprinted on his cloak.
The image helped priests inculcate Catholicism among indigenous Mexicans during Spanish colonial rule, and the church later made her patron of all the Americas. Juan Diego was canonized as the hemisphere's first Indian saint in 2002 during the papacy of John Paul II.
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