“On Saturday, 7 May, in the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall in Rome, Doctors with Africa CUAMM met with Pope Francis in a special papal audience. Joining us were more than 9,000 people from all over Italy and elsewhere – individuals and groups, volunteer workers, supporters and friends, aid-workers, doctors and other medical staff, the young and the old, families, children – people who share CUAMM’s vision and resolve to meet tough challenges day in and day out in order to carry out its mission.

In remarks to the CUAMM membership on Saturday, Pope Francis said: ‘In the wake of these great witnesses of missionary and evangelically fruitful closeness, you carry on your work with courage, giving expression to a Church that is not a clinic exclusively for super A-list VIPs, but rather a ‘field hospital’: a Church with a great heart, close to the many wounded and humiliated of history, to the poorest of the poor'”

Cuamm report
http://www.mediciconlafrica.org/en/our-voice/news/pope-francis-speech/

See also: Cordaid report
https://www.cordaid.org/en/news/blessed-pope-francis/

See also: http://www.catholicculture.org

Speaking to 9,000 people associated with the medical missionary organization Doctors with Africa, Pope Francis said that “health is not a consumer good, but rather a universal right, and therefore access to health care services cannot be a privilege

“Health care, especially at the most basic level, is indeed denied in many parts of the world and many regions of Africa,” the Pope said on May 7 in Paul VI Audience Hall. “Access to health care services, treatment and medicines remains a mirage. The poorest are unable to pay and are excluded from hospital services, even the most essential primary care.”

The Pope praised the organization’s work with pregnant mothers and newborn babies and referred to “”the geographical peripheries in which the Lord sends you to be good Samaritans, to reach out to the poor Lazarus, through the door that leads from the first to the third world.”