By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Leo XIV took his first trip outside the Vatican on Saturday, heading about an hour’s drive east of Rome for a visit to a Catholic shrine and stopping on the way back to pay respects at the tomb of his predecessor Francis.
Leo waved from the passenger side of a Volkswagen vehicle as he arrived at Rome’s St. Mary Major Basilica. Entering the church to a few shouts of “Viva il papa” (Long live the pope), Leo walked slowly to Francis’ tomb, laying a white flower on it.
He then knelt in prayer for a few moments.
Leo made the trip to St. Mary Major after travelling to the small town of Genazzano, where he had earlier visited a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Leo, the former U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected pope on May 8. He is a member of the Augustinian religious order, which runs the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano.
Leo shook hands and offered blessings to a few people in the crowd before entering the shrine.
At the end of the visit there, the pope told those in the shrine that he wanted to come to pray for guidance in the first days of his papacy, according to a Vatican statement.
The late Pope Francis, who died on April 21, made surprise visits to Catholic sites near Rome quite frequently. He asked to be buried at St. Mary Major in a simple tomb, decorated only with an inscription of the word “Franciscus”, his name in Latin.
Francis had a special devotion to the basilica, another Marian shrine. In the first days after his burial, more than 30,000 people packed the church to visit his final resting place.
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee, editing by Alvise Armellini and Timothy Heritage)
