Pope: Faith and hope will beat financial pain

The Pope was celebrating an open-air Mass for 80,000 people in Lisbon today, urging Europeans to seek joy in faith and hope as a way of overcoming financial hardship.

At the start of his four-day visit, Pope Benedict XVI will send "a message of hope which says it is possible, if we are guided by ethical and spiritual values, to find paths to a new future," said Carlos Azevedo, the auxiliary bishop of Lisbon.

"The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church," the pontiff said. "The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice."

About 342,000 Portuguese took home the minimum salary of 475 a month last year, roughly twice as many as in 2006. The Pope has repeatedly pressed leaders to ensure the poor do not bear the brunt of financial pain.

Tomorrow, he will go to the Catholic shrine at Fatima, in central Portugal.

A three-year austerity plan to ease the country's crippling debt load is expected to bring greater hardship to people already strugglign financially. Portuguese bishops last year called attention to what they called "scandalous levels of misery".

Bishop Azevedo said one of the pope's main concerns in Portugal was "to awaken slumbering Christians and also, to some extent, a Europe whose values have become somewhat decadent, to different values".