Correction appended: July 22, 2013, 4:19 a.m. E.T.

If Pope Francis is going to fashion himself the Pope of the poor, he could find few places in the world better to start than Varginha. Located within the favela of Manguinhos, which in turn lies in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro, it is a miserable place, where most residents get by on roughly $156 a month. On July 25, Francis will visit the neighborhood to deliver a blessing at its small stone chapel. It’s not hard to imagine him afterward, stepping out onto the chapel’s neatly swept patio and pausing to take in the view. To the left, open sewage runs through alleyways and children fly cheap paper kites on the piles of uncollected rubbish that function as the neighborhood’s only playground. To the right and across the train tracks, a vast field of rubble dotted with semidemolished houses — many of them still occupied, their exteriors torn off to reveal the turquoise and red walls of former residents’ kitchens and living rooms — stretches as far as the eye can see. But if Varginha offers a vivid example of the crushing poverty, uneven development and profound class divisions that plague Brazil even as it attempts to turn itself into a model of South American prosperity — issues which sparked massive protests earlier this summer — both the neighborhood and the favela in which it’s located also embody another set of tensions: the ones Francis’ own church faces.