Pope holds mass in Madison Square Garden

The pope gave his homily in front of almost 20,000 worshippers, who all took communion in the famed New York stadium on Friday evening.

"Living in a big city is not always easy," Pope Francis said in Spanish, urging the audience not to forget "the faces of all those people who don't appear to belong, or are second-class citizens."

"They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity," he said.

After the speech, the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo gave the leader of the Catholic Church a cross cut from steel salvaged from the World Trade Center.

The pope had visited Ground Zero earlier in the day, as part of a busy itinerary during the fourth day of his six-day visit to the US.

Dreams of education

The pope drove to Madison Square Garden in an open-sided Jeep, passing a crowd of around 80,000 people in Central Park.

Previously, Pope Francis visited a largely Hispanic Catholic school in East Harlem, where he talked to children, their parents and some 150 immigrants and refugees.

Talking to a mostly Latino and black audience, the Argentinean-born pontiff cited Martin Luther King.

"One day he said, 'I have a dream'," said Francis. "His dream was that many children like you could have access to education."

"Don't forget about that. Today we want to keep dreaming," he added.

The pope is set to leave for Philadelphia on Saturday morning, for the final leg of his US trip.

A crowd of up to one million people is expected to turn up for the final papal mass on Sunday.

dj/lw (AP, AFP, Reuters, dpa)