GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) - 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 amid 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 (40 kilometers) to reach Samanes Park.
The Vatican had originally estimated more than 1 million people would turn out for the Mass, and government organizers put the crowd at above 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 enormous 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 bitter divisions between liberals and conservatives, particularly over ministering to gays and to Catholics who divorce and remarry outside of the church. Church teaching holds that Catholics who enter into a second marriage without having the first one annulled cannot receive Communion.
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."