(ANSA) - ROME, APR 2 - Pope Francis celebrated Palm Sunday Mass saying in a slightly weak voice after recovering from a three-day hospital bout with a chest complaint that he, too, needed Jesus to caress him.
    "I too need Jesus to caress me, to come close to me, and for this I go to see him in the abandoned, the lonely", the 86-year-old Argentine pontiff said in his homily at the Palm Sunday Mass in St Peter's.
    Francis was standing up leaning on a stick and did not need the wheelchair that he often used because of a chronic knee problem.
    Having been discharged Saturday from Rome's top Gemelli Hospital after successful treatment for a bronchial infection, Francis arrived in the centre of St Peter's Square in the popemobile to bless the traditional palm leaves surrounded by some 30,000 faithful.
    The pope, who is still convalescing, wore a white overcoat, upon which he had placed a red stole for the benediction.
    His voice was a little fatigued.
    In his homily, Francis said that there are many Christs abandoned today, as Jesus was after his triumphant entrance to Jerusalem which Palm Sunday commemorates.
    "Today there are so many 'abandoned Christians'", the pope said, stressing that "the forsaken Jesus asks us to have eyes and heart for the abandoned".
    "There are whole peoples exploited and left to themselves; there are poor people who live at the crossroads of our streets and whose gaze we do not have the courage to meet; migrants who are no longer faces but numbers; rejected prisoners, people catalogued as problems.
    "But there are also so many invisible, hidden, abandoned Christians who are discarded with white gloves: unborn children, elderly people left alone, who may be your father your mother your grandfather and grandmother abandoned in geriatric hospitals; sick people not visited, disabled people ignored, young people who feel a great emptiness inside without anyone really listening to their cry of pain and who find no other way but suicide". (ANSA).