Pope Francis
visited a refugee camp in Greece on the frontier of Europe’s migration routes and known as on the continent to welcome folk seeking asylum from wrestle and diverse humanitarian disasters.
“I seek data from every man and girl, all of us, to beat the paralysis of danger, the indifference that kills, the cynical push aside that nonchalantly condemns to dying those on the fringes,” the pope acknowledged on Sunday morning, at some stage in a focus on about with to the middle on the Greek island of Lesbos, which homes extra than 2,000 refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, the Center East and Africa.
Many diverse folk hold died looking out to reach Lesbos and diverse Greek islands by sea. “The Mediterranean, which for millennia has brought diverse peoples and much-off lands together, is now becoming a grim cemetery without tombstones,” the pope acknowledged.
It was Pope Francis’s 2d focus on about with to Lesbos. In April 2016, on the peak of Europe’s migration disaster, he visited a notoriously overcrowded camp on the island, meeting with migrants and lamenting their “tragic and indeed determined need.” In a shock cross, he then returned to Rome with 12 Syrian refugees.
Greece has for years been a vital level of entry into Europe for folk fleeing wrestle-torn or impoverished ingredients of neighboring continents. The country has heightened security on its land and sea borders with Turkey to in the reduction of the series of asylum seekers. Greece has denied allegations from human-rights groups, international media and officers from the European Union and the United Worldwide locations that it’s illegally pushing again asylum seekers into Turkey.
The pope’s Lesbos focus on about with got right here on the fourth day of his five-day papal focus on about with to Cyprus and Greece, which has highlighted migration, a signature instruct of the current pontificate.
Pope Francis, who was accompanied on the camp on Lesbos by Greek President
Katerina Sakellaropoulou,
acknowledged “with deep regret, we must admit that this country, love others, is mute onerous-pressed, and that in Europe there are others who persist in treating the instruct as a matter that does no longer distress them.”
Those phrases echoed the pope’s remarks on Saturday, in a speech on the presidential palace in Athens, when he lamented the “nationalistic selfishness” that he acknowledged was blockading a coordinated response by European states and known as on them to accept migrants “basically based on the percentages of every country.”
The pope entered the Lesbos camp on foot, pausing frequently to greet residents along his path, a form of them households with youth. Many of the migrants wore masks however the pope didn’t. Pope Francis, who turns 85 this month and regularly walks with a limp attributable to nerve grief in his leg, held on to the arm of a priest beside him for strengthen.
Christian Tango Mukalya, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo and a resident of the camp since November 2020, addressed the pope instant at some stage in a welcoming ceremony. He acknowledged that he was the father of three little youth, two of whom had been with him in the camp. He had lost contact with the different cramped one and their mother, he acknowledged.
The pope addressed a neighborhood of asylum seekers and visited a few of the camp’s residents at their dwelling quarters in transient structures along the seafront.
On Friday in Cyprus, the pope decried a culture of indifference to migrants but acknowledged that the little island country was little in its means to address an influx of undocumented arrivals, which Cyprus’s govt says hold elevated by nearly 40% this year over 2020.
Cypriot President
Nicos Anastasiades
thanked Pope Francis on Thursday for offering to settle on 50 migrants from Cyprus. The Vatican confirmed on Friday that 12 of those migrants would be moved to Italy in the approaching weeks.
Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com
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Appeared in the December 6, 2021, print version as ‘Pope Asks Europe to Start to Migrants.’
