Pope Beatifies 124 South Korean Catholic Martyrs

                            
Pope Francis has celebrated a large open-air Mass to beatify 124 of South Korea’s first Catholics at a ceremony in the capital Seoul.
He paid tribute to the Koreans, who died for their faith in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Saturday’s Mass came on the third day of his visit – his first trip to Asia since becoming pope in March 2013.

Pope Francis met survivors of the Sewol ferry disaster and delivered his first public Mass in the region on Friday.
The beautification ceremony was held at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul, with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.
Beatification, or declaring a person “blessed”, is the necessary prelude to full sainthood.
There is something in the manner of Pope Francis that seems to win people over, Catholics and non-Catholics, wherever he goes. And he has done it again here in South Korea.
His lack of formality has shone through. On Friday he stopped in the middle of a prepared speech to a gathering of young Catholics and said he wanted to “speak directly from his heart, without reading from a piece of paper,” but that his English was not good enough”. “No!” shouted the 6,000 teenagers in one voice.
There is also plenty of talk, in this status-conscious society, about the Pope’s use of a tiny hatch-back as his official car, most of it approving. The Church is seen in South Korea as a supporter of the poor and the politically dispossessed, so much so that the Korean right has accused it of being ‘socialist’.
In South Korea Pope Francis seems to have found a Catholic clergy and believers who share his vision of what the Church of Rome should be.