Watch: as Pope Francis visits Italian prison for foot-washing Mass

Watch as Pope Francis visits Italy’s Rebibbia prison for a foot washing Mass on Thursday 28 March.

The pontiff looked well as he began four intense days of events leading to Easter this morning and renewed his own ordination vow on the day the Roman Catholic Church marks Jesus’s founding of the priesthood the night before the crucifixion.

Francis, who recently curtailed his speaking engagements because of fatigue related to bouts of bronchitis and influenza, read a long homily during a Holy Thursday “Mass of the Chrism” in St Peter’s Basilica.

Holy Thursday commemorates the day of Jesus’ Last Supper with his apostles the night before he died.

On Thursday afternoon, the Pope presided over a traditional foot-washing ritual in the women’s section of Rome’s Rebibbia prison.

Francis is the first pope to hold the foot-washing ceremony outside churches, usually in prisons, homes for the elderly or hospices, continuing a practice he began when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires.

He is also the first to include women and non-Christians in the service.

The ceremony echoes Jesus’s gesture of humility toward his apostles on the night before he died.