MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“A faith without solidarity, is a dead faith”, Francis tells a mass of over a million people

The altar's backdrop was made of corn cobs, coconuts, squashes, beans, seeds and other local produce to create huge murals of St. Francis of Assisi

Pope Francis, wrapping up on Sunday his three-country tour of South America, urged people living in a flood-prone shantytown in Paraguay to stay united in their struggle for better living and working conditions.

 Francis looked moved as he heard harrowing tales of life in Bañado Norte, a warren of shacks not far from downtown Asuncion that are home to about 100,000 people, many of whom are squatting on city land after being forced from their farms.

From Bañado Norte, the pope went to hold a mass for more than a million people, in a disused air base.

The altar's backdrop was designed by a local artist who used corn cobs, coconuts, squashes, beans, seeds and other local produce to create huge murals of St. Francis of Assisi, from whom the pope took his name, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, the religious order to which he belongs.

The Argentine pontiff has made defending the poor a major theme of his “homecoming” trip, which also took him to Ecuador and Bolivia, ranked among Latin America's poorest countries.

On Saturday night, he appealed to world leaders to seek a new economic model to help the destitute, and to shun policies that “sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit”.

In Bañado Norte, murals adorned the walls of houses made of corrugated metal, wood and cement blocks. One of them read: “Yes to life, no to drugs, fight for change.”

The pope, who prayed in a chapel in the Bañado Norte slum, told them: “Keep going. Don't let the devil divide you,” noting that “a faith without solidarity is a dead faith”. At the end of his visit he asked them say the Lord's Prayer in the Guarani language.

Francis regularly entered slums in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, when he was archbishop and has visited some of Rome's poorer neighborhoods.