Pope Francis Blesses 35,000 Motorcycles

Pope Francis blessed 35,000 Harley Davidson riders at St. Peter's Square in the Vatican on Sunday, in commemoration of the 110th anniversary of the motorcycle.

The meeting of the Holy Cee with the legendary American hog may seem a little odd: Catholicism is all about self-sacrifice; motorcycling is all about individualistic freedom. Nonetheless, a Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the papal Mass is welcome to all, telling the Associated Press, "I know great people who have big bikes."

The Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based company gave the Pope two white Harleys to add to his motorcade, and several motorists waved flags in support of Francis.

One thing connecting Catholicism and the Harley is their astonishing growth in Latin America. Over the last one hundred years, Latin America and the Caribbean's Catholic population has grown from 71 million to 425 million. Latin American now represents the largest share of Catholics in the world at 39 percent. Pope Francis, an Argentine, is the first Latin American head of the Church.

Meanwhile, Harley Davidson is aggressively making inroads into the Latin American community. In 2011, the company opened a headquarters in Miami, Florida to better serve Latin American clientele. The company makes bikes out of Manaus, Brazil and has been manufacturing in Mexico for over 80 years. According to a 2011 press release, the company expects 40 percent of the bike's sales to be international by 2014, with many of those sales coming from south of the American border.

For many in the Americas, the greatest motorcycle trip in the world is the Pan-American Highway. Exemplified in the 2004 biopic film "The Motorcycle Diaries", viewers watched Ernesto "Che" Guevara ride stretches of the road between Argentina and Chile. The Pan-American is a network of roads stretching nearly 30,000 miles from Alaska to Patagonia broken only at a 99-mile Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. Save for that gap, it is the largest motorable road in the world.