An exclusive look at the draft schedule for Pope Francis’s U.S. trip this fall - The Washington Post

 

By Michelle Boorstein June 26 at 8:51 PM

Pope Francis will meet with inmates in a Philadelphia prison gym, poor migrants at a D.C. church — where he may serve them lunch — and disadvantaged youth at an East Harlem elementary school, according to a working itinerary of his visit this fall to the United States that was shared with The Washington Post.

The itinerary for the trip — the pope’s first to the United States — is not final. The Vatican is expected to release an official version in the next few days, and church officials Friday emphasized that even that version could change before Francis arrives Sept. 22. A person close to the U.S. planning process provided The Post with the itinerary, and a second person knowledgeable of the Vatican team confirmed multiple details of the document.

The working itinerary reveals the pope’s plans to speak repeatedly about the plight of immigrants, including at Our Lady Queen of Angels School and on Independence Mall park in Philadelphia before tens of thousands of people. The Argentine pope will often speak in Spanish during the trip, the itinerary shows, highlighting the origins of the Catholic Church’s first Latin American pontiff and the fact that the U.S. church is one-third Hispanic — and quickly becoming more so.

An exclusive look at the draft schedule for Pope Francis’s U.S. trip this fall - The Washington Post