'The pope means hope for a lot of immigrants'

He hadn't planned to go to Mass that day six weeks ago.

Yet something moved Francisco Elotlan, 32, to attend his church in southern Alabama, where he has lived as an undocumented Mexican immigrant since 2004.

Immediately following that August Mass, there was a lottery drawing. The winner would get a spot on the chartered bus bringing 56 pilgrims 1,000 miles from the 25 Hispanic parishes in the Archdiocese of Mobile to Philadelphia for Saturday's papal Mass on the Parkway.

The Aquinas Center, a South Philadelphia convent turned community center that strives to bridge cultural divides, is to host them in a dormitory filled with bunk beds.

But first, the large number of aspirants had to be whittled down to the number of available beds.

One by one, the lottery participants drew white slips from a box. All blank.

Drawing last, Elotlan, known to his friends as "Panchito," pulled the one marked "Pilgrimage."

"I was so full of emotion," he said Tuesday, a day before starting the 20-hour, nonstop ride north Wednesday night. "I just started jumping and said, 'Yes, yes, yes!'"

An amateur musician who directs his church's choir, Elotlan immediately spent $300 on a new guitar, which he is bringing with him to have blessed by the pope at the Mass on the Parkway.

Full-price transportation and lodging for the pilgrimage is $500 a head, but only 30 percent of the passengers are paying that, organizers said. The remaining seats are being subsidized by various parishes and pastors, with some passengers paying nothing.

The bus is equipped with video screens, so between screenings of The Francis Effect and other documentaries about the popular pontiff, Elotlan will be strumming, playing such sing-alongs as "Amigo, tu eres mi hermano del alma" - "Friend, you are my soul brother."

Elotlan's decision to come to America a decade ago was born of necessity, he said. In Veracruz, his mother struggled to support the family selling tortillas on the street.

"I saw how hard it was getting for her," he said. So after he graduated from high school he came to the United States, took a job pouring cement, and sent money home - a grim but dignified daily grind, which Pope Francis often highlights in his homilies about the plight of migrants.

Two weeks ago, said Elotlan, when a construction crew chief denied him two days off to come to Philadelphia, he quit and immediately found the same work with a more accommodating leader. Nothing, he said, was going to keep him from seeing Francis in Philadelphia, which is "the closest I can get to God."

The Philadelphia-Mobile connection was sparked by Olga Villar, director of the Hispanic ministry office of the Mobile Archdiocese, and Sister Janet Santibanez of the Aquinas Center, who formerly worked in Alabama.

Santibanez, a nun with the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, met Villar at a retreat in Alabama last December.

"A priest introduced us," recalled Villar, who already was on the lookout for ways to bring parishioners to see the pope. "When [Santibanez] said, 'I'm from Philadelphia,' that was what I needed to hear. I started bugging her. I started asking if there is a place that we could stay. She mentioned the Aquinas Center and gave me the number for Bethany."

That's center director Bethany Welch, who was busy Tuesday preparing for the guests, and for a Mass on Friday at the center led by Mobile Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi, and followed by a multicultural potluck.

"We had about 25 groups from all around the country asking to use our facilities," said Welch, who took applications and, along with her board, sifted through them.

"We decided that rather than give the space to people who were offering four times the nightly rate, we would go with a group that might not have other options to come to Philadelphia," she said.

And instead of the normal nightly rate of $40 per person, she said, the Alabama group is paying a flat fee of $75 for Thursday through Sunday, which includes a ticket for the pope's Saturday address on Independence Mall.

Rodi and a contingent of 25 clergy, including seminarians, are coming separately and staying at the Midtown Holiday Inn Express.

For the pilgrims on the bus, said Patrick Arensberg, director of religious education for the Archdiocese of Mobile, coming to Philadelphia is a chance "to be plugged into the universal church and realize that it is much bigger than their lived experience in rural Alabama."

For Esperanza Rodriguez, 39, who came to Alabama from Honduras, riding the bus to see Francis feels like the payoff for years of cooking and serving meals to workers in Alabama's agricultural fields, cleaning houses, and selling beauty products to eke out a living.

She plans to "wait for him with love and an open heart, because he has been a vehicle to change many hearts."

Talking about her forthcoming pilgrimage to see the pope, Sonia Cruz, 35, of Gulf Shores, Ala., broke down in tears.

She was 10 when her mother brought her from San Luis Potosí state in Mexico to the United States 25 years ago. Now she manages a company that sells stone for hardscaping.

Starting out in Brownsville, Texas, she said, her family moved throughout the Southeast as migrant farm workers, harvesting beans, tomatoes, peaches, and berries.

After graduating from high school, she began studying to be a medical translator, she said, but had to quit to help her mother with living expenses.

"The pope means hope for a lot of immigrants," said Cruz, "because he puts out a word for a lot of us."

Among her luggage, she said, is a backpack filled with rosaries and prayer cards to be blessed by the pope and then given to her family as sacred souvenirs.

"He is coming many miles to speak for us," she said. "Just to be there and be part of it is like a big dream."

mmatza@phillynews.com

215-854-2541@MichaelMatza1