Pope blasts ‘invisible walls’ in ceremony at Panama youth jail
LAS GARZAS, Panama — Pope Francis on Friday brought World Youth Day to Panama’s juvenile delinquents, celebrating an emotional penitential liturgy inside the country’s main youth prison since the inmates couldn’t participate in the Catholic Church’s big festival of faith outside.
Fulfilling his belief that no one should be separated from God’s mercy, Francis also heard the confessions of five inmates at the Las Garzas de Pacora detention center. At least one of them wept uncontrollably afterward.
“There are no words to describe the freedom I feel in this moment,” one of the inmates, Luis Oscar Martinez, told the pope at the start of the service inside the barbed wire-ringed facility outside Panama City.