VATICAN CITY ¨C Pope Francis swiped a tablet Sunday to launch a new app allowing the faithful to pray with him, and expressed his pain over the car bomb blast in Colombia and the latest Mediterranean migrant tragedy.
He presented the Vatican¡¯s latest digital platform, known as the Worldwide Network of Prayer with the pope, during his traditional Sunday address to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter¡¯s Square.
The new app, called Click to Pray, will inform the user what the leader of the world¡¯s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics is praying for, such as world peace or the population of a country hit by a natural disaster, so they can join him.
Francis, who once said he was a ¡°disaster¡± with technology, turned to a priest holding the tablet for him and asked, ¡°Did I do it?¡± The priest nodded.
A Vatican statement said a website, , will allow the faithful to ¡°accompany the pope in a mission of compassion for the world.¡±
Minutes earlier, the pope told the crowd: ¡°Today, I have two pains in my heart. Colombia and the Mediterranean.¡±
¡°I am thinking of the 170 victims in the Mediterranean. They were looking for a future for their lives and perhaps they were victims of human traffickers. Let us pray for them and for those who are responsible for what happened,¡± he said.
The migrants were believed to have been lost in the Mediterranean in two incidents involving dinghies that left from Libya and Morocco.
Speaking of Colombia, he called Thursday¡¯s car bomb at a police academy that killed at least 21 and injured dozens ¡°a terrorist attack.¡±
Colombian President Ivan Duque said the rebel group ELN was responsible.
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