Full Coverage: Pope Francis in Mexico

When two of the most visible figures on the international stage, Pope Francis and Donald Trump, exchanged sharp words over immigration Thursday, an extraordinary election year took another dramatic twist.

After ending a dramatic tour of Mexico, Pope Francis on Thursday seemed to open the door for limited use of artificial contraception, long prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, to prevent pregnancies at risk from the disastrous, fast-spreading Zika virus.

Pope Francis concluded an emotional, provocative journey through Mexico on Wednesday, symbolically tracing the path of migrants headed for the United States and ending up at the border that divides and unites two societies.

Father Javier Calvillo Salazar arrived at the site of Pope Francis’ upcoming appearance carrying an unusual offering: a box full of migrants’ old shoes, worn and dirty.

In September of 2014, modern Mexican history was severed into two distinct periods: before and after 43 students at a rural teachers college, Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, disappeared.

Iris Alondra Hipolito, a 17-year-old high school student from Los Angeles, didn’t know what was coming.

As she stopped her SUV to be inspected by a customs agent, Andrea Aguirre offered an explanation that’s heard a lot these days as people cross from El Paso south to its sister city.

Alma Martinez got a call last year that made her whole body go cold.

Growing up Catholic in Michoacan state, Alberto Cornejo always marveled at the beauty of the Gothic cathedral in his hometown of Zamora.

On the Mexican side of the border, they drove a battered brown Chevy sedan, slogging through rutted pavement and dirt streets lined with cinder-block shanties and school buses ferrying workers to the maquiladoras — manufacturing plants that fuel the local economy.

In a Mass sprinkled with indigenous languages and customs, Pope Francis on Monday gave recognition to the “misunderstood” and “excluded” native peoples long repressed by Mexican power.

In 1994, this mountain town vaulted into global headlines when a group of peasants launched the Zapatista revolution, seeking greater rights for the impoverished and long-repressed indigenous population in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas.

Pope Francis on Sunday went to one of Mexico’s poorest and most dangerous cities and urged hundreds of thousands of faithful to make Mexico a land of opportunity, “where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream.”

A deportee fashioned the rough-hewn altar for Pope Francis’ cross-border Mass on Wednesday, a stonemason born here but raised in Texas who hopes to one day rejoin his three children and other family in the U.S.

A bag bulging with trash fell from the garbage truck and a sanitation worker watched as it tumbled into the canal.

The devoted and the curious gathered 10 deep at times to watch as the motorcade headed down the Calzada de Guadalupe, the avenue leading to Mexico’s pre-eminent religious shrine, the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

With bluntness rare for a pope, Francis wasted no time on his first full day in Mexico on Saturday, taking to task both the political elite here and the often-ineffective church leadership for failing to confront the grievous ills facing this troubled country.

Every weekday, Iris Alondra Hipolito waits for her 14-year-old brother Luis to arrive home from school.

While in Mexico for the next five days, Pope Francis is expected to take up issues that have been of central concern to his papacy.

Pope Francis arrived Friday night on his first trip as pontiff to the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country of Mexico, following a historic meeting in Cuba with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and looking ahead to a pointed and problematic mission.

Pope Francis on Friday crossed the Atlantic Ocean and then a millennium of division and distrust when he traveled to Cuba and met with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Noel Díaz is over the moon.

Before his journey to Mexico, Pope Francis had a favor to ask.

As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future Pope Francis was a thorn in the side of the Argentine leadership, especially the husband and wife presidency of Nestor and Christina Kirchner.

When Pope Francis visits the western state of Michoacan next Tuesday, he will step into a plaza that holds the memory of one of the drug war’s most heinous acts of violence.

As Mexico prepares for the Friday arrival of Pope Francis, not everyone is looking forward to the visit.

Not long ago, this sprawling border city was known as the murder capital of Mexico.

Pope Francis travels to Mexico this week, saying he wants to “live the faith” of the overwhelmingly Catholic country but will not shy away from confronting issues of violence and corruption that could make his governmental hosts quite uncomfortable.