{{Pope Francis prepared to lead his first Easter Sunday celebrations with tens of thousands of people expected in St Peter’s Square for a mass marking the holiest day in the Christian calendar.}}<\/p>\n
The ceremony will be followed by a special “Urbi et Orbi” blessing for Rome and the world that the pope will deliver from the same balcony where he made his first public appearance after his election this month.<\/p>\n
At an Easter Vigil in St Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, the first pontiff from outside Europe in nearly 1,300 years of Church history reached out to non-believers and lapsed Catholics, urging them to “step forward” towards God.<\/p>\n
“He will receive you with open arms,” said the 76-year-old Argentine pope, formerly the archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has called for the Roman Catholic Church to be closer to ordinary people and the needy.<\/p>\n
“Let us not close our hearts,” he appealed to the congregation in a mass in which he also baptised four converts.<\/p>\n
He added: “Let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change.”<\/p>\n
Easter Sunday celebrates the Christian belief in Jesus’s death and resurrection and is marked around the world, often with a variety of not strictly religious local traditions like painted eggs or Easter Bunnies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{Pope Francis prepared to lead his first Easter Sunday celebrations with tens of thousands of people expected in St Peter’s Square for a mass marking the holiest day in the Christian calendar.}} The ceremony will be followed by a special “Urbi et Orbi” blessing for Rome and the world that the pope will deliver from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[101],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-6853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-internationl","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=6853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}