GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador -- Hundreds of thousands of people filled a park in Ecuador's main port city Monday for Pope Francis' first big event of his three-nation South American tour, hoping for a glimpse of Latin America's first pope returning to his home soil for a Mass dedicated to the family.
Many pilgrims spent the night outdoors, and some walked for miles to reach the park on Guayaquil's northern outskirts where the crowd sang hymns and sought pockets of shade to keep cool despite the scorching sun and high humidity. Firefighters sprayed them with water hoses to provide relief.
"I'm tired; I'm hungry; I haven't slept, but I'm also full of emotion and joy in my heart," said Vicente Huilcatoma, a 47-year-old retired police officer who walked 25 miles to reach Samanes Park.
The Vatican originally had estimated more than 1 million people would turn out for the Mass, and government organizers also put the crowd at more than 1 million people in the hour before the service began. But Gabriel Almeida, the government spokesman at the scene, rolled back the estimate to several hundred thousand after officials viewed aerial images of the area.
Across the park, Ecuadoran national flags and papal banners waved above the sea of people, who were divided into quadrants that Francis looped around slowly on his popemobile to cheers of "Francisco! Francisco!"
In his homily, Francis praised families as the bedrock of society -- "the nearest hospital, the first school for the young, the best home for the elderly" -- and said miracles are performed every day inside a family out of love. But he said sometimes the love and happiness runs out.
"How many women, sad and lonely, wonder when love left, when it slipped away from their lives?" he asked. "How many elderly people feel left out of family celebrations, cast aside and longing each day for a little love?"
Francis has dedicated the first two years of his pontificate to family issues, giving weekly catechism lessons on different aspects of family life and inviting the entire church to study ways to provide better pastoral care for Catholic families, people who are divorced, gays and families in "nontraditional" situations.
A preliminary meeting of bishops on these issues ended last year in divisions between liberals and conservatives, particularly over ministering to gays and to Catholics who divorce and remarry outside of the church.
In his homily Monday, Francis said he hoped the second meeting of bishops on family life, scheduled for October, would come up with "concrete solutions to the many difficult and significant challenges facing families in our time."
"I ask you to pray fervently for this intention, so that Christ can take even what might seem to us impure, scandalous or threatening, and turn it ... into a miracle."
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis wasn't referring to the gay or divorce issues specifically but was making a more general reference that he hoped the bishops would "help the church chart this path of leaving a situation of sin to one of grace."
On his arrival in Guayaquil, the pontiff allowed several acolytes on the tarmac to take selfies with him. He then headed to the Shrine of the Divine Mercy, where 2,000 invitees gathered including child cancer patients, residents of homes for the elderly abandoned by their families and some of Guayaquil's poorest people.
He told those gathered that he would pray for them "and I won't charge you a thing. All I ask, please, is that you pray for me."
The crowd in Los Samanes park was festive, with young and old overjoyed at seeing the first pope in their lives.
"I'll ask the pope to intercede so that God gives me my health," said 90-year-old Guillermina Aveiga Davila, who arrived at dawn from the coastal city of Chone, some about 185 miles away. "I want to reach 100."
The "pope of the poor" returned to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time as pontiff Sunday, stressing the importance of protecting the needy and the environment from exploitation and to foster dialogue among all sectors of society.
Francis' only other trip back to Latin America since being elected pope was in 2013, when he visited Brazil, where Portuguese is the main language.
Francis' environmental message -- issued last month in a treatise staking the Earth's preservation as a core mission for humanity -- is particularly relevant for Ecuador, a Pacific nation that is home to one of the world's most species-diverse ecosystems but is also an OPEC country heavily dependent on oil. High crude prices have lifted 1.3 million people out of poverty in recent years.
Information for this article was contributed by Jacobo Garcia and Frank Bajak of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/07/2015