Pope leads huge mass in Quito

Pope Francis warned against the "temptation" of "single leaderships" on Tuesday in front of nearly one million people at an outdoor mass in Ecuador's capital, recently rocked by anti-government protests.

The Argentine-born pontiff focused his homily on "our revolution," the need to spread the Roman Catholic faith, as he addressed 900,000 faithful who braved the cold and rain to hear him in Quito's Bicentennial Park.

"The enormous richness of variety ... moves us away from the temptation of offers that are closer to dictatorships, ideologies or sectarianism," history's first Latin American pope said.

"Fight for inclusion at all levels," Pope Francis said, pleading for "dialogue" on the third day of a South American tour that will also take him to Bolivia and Paraguay.

President Rafael Correa attended the mass. For the past month, Correa has faced the biggest protests of his eight-year-old administration, as his socialist policies have angered business leaders as well as the upper and middle classes, which want him to step down.

Correa, an admirer of the pope, and Francis had a private meeting late Monday. The pope later said he would bless the country so that "it has no differences."

- Veiled message to Correa? -

During the mass, the pope invoked South America's independence movements from Spain 200 years ago.

"That cry for liberty... did not lack conviction or force, but history tells us that it was only convincing when personalism, the desire for single leaderships, were put aside," Francis said.

He did not single out any country or government, in a region that has known right-wing dictatorships in the past and controversial left-wing leaders in recent years.

But some of the faithful saw the pope's words as a veiled message to Correa and the opposition.

"In an indirect way, he told the president to take into account that there are people who don't have the same ideas as him. He is asking in a way that some things that people don't agree with are changed," said Felipe Lascano, a 22-year-old university student.

- Bolivia on Wednesday -

Pope Francis met with Ecuadoran bishops before the mass. Later in the day, he will visit the Catholic University before a meeting with civil society groups, including indigenous populations opposed to Correa.

The pope already celebrated a huge outdoor mass with 800,000 people at a park in the coastal city of Guayaquil, where he focused on the theme of family as the heart of society.

Poverty will also be a major topic during this South American tour by "the pope of the poor."

It is the first visit by a pontiff to Ecuador in three decades. His first visit to Latin America as pope was in Brazil in 2013.

His current tour comes at a time when the Vatican is losing followers to protestantism in Latin America, where many of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics hail from.

The Ecuador leg of his trip ends Wednesday with a visit to an sanctuary to the Virgin of El Quinche outside Quito before heading to Bolivia.

During the trip, Francis is due to deliver 22 speeches and catch seven flights covering a total of 24,000 kilometers (15,000 miles).

All three of the countries he is visiting are predominantly Catholic and have been marked by a long history of poverty and inequality mostly afflicting indigenous populations.

When Pope John Paul II visited Ecuador in 1985, about 94 percent of the population was Catholic, compared to 80 percent today in the country of 16 million.

The decrease has come as evangelical churches have attracted huge numbers of followers, many of whom are indigenous people disenchanted by a lack of attention from the Catholic hierarchy.