Pope urges making Mexico “land of opportunity”

Pope Francis urged Mexicans to make the country into a land of opportunity, not a place of emigration where young people are "destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death."

In a final prayer at the end of Mass on Sunday, Francis urged the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in the gritty suburb of Ecatepec to be on the "front lines" in forging Mexico's future.

He urged them to make their country "a land of opportunities, where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death."

Decrying "a society of the few and for the few", he denounced deep inequality and the vanity and pride of those who consider themselves a cut above the rest.

"That wealth which tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering. This is the bread that a corrupt family or society gives its own children," the Pope said at the Mass in Ecatepec.