Migrants represent all those rejected by a globalised society, Pope Francis said today in a strongly worded homily during a Mass to mark the anniversary of his visit to the island of Lampedusa.
During a private liturgy celebrated in St Peter’s Basilica, attended by around 250 people migrants, refugees, and those dedicated to saving their lives, Francis stressed the problems of those fleeing their countries in search of a better life could not be reduced to “social” issues.
“Migrants are first of all human persons,” he explained during the Mass, which took place at the altar of the Chair of St Peter, a place which represents the heart of the papacy’s mission and authority. “They are the symbol of all those rejected by today’s globalised society.”
The 82-year-old Roman Pontiff was speaking six years after his trip to Lampedusa, an island of the southern coast of Italy, and an arrival point for refugees. That visit was his first outside of Rome as Pope and set the tone for a pontificate that has repeatedly defended migrants and called on the monasteries and parishes in Europe to open their doors to new arrivals.
In 2016 he took the dramatic step of bringing back 12 Muslim refugees to the Vatican on his papal plane following a trip to the Greek Island of Lesbos and has criticised President Donald Trump’s decision to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border.
Today, he made a veiled criticism of the Trump administration’s policy of holding refugees, including children, in detention camps.
Migrants, he said, are the “least ones are abandoned and cheated into dying in the desert; these least ones are tortured, abused and violated in detention camps.”
The Pope went on: “these least ones face the waves of an unforgiving sea; these least ones are left in reception camps too long for them to be called temporary.”
Along with Trump, Francis is also on a collision course with Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, who has banned migrant boats from entering the country’s waters. The far-right political leader, who rose to power on an anti-migrant platform, has criticised the Pope’s stance on refugees.
In his homily, Francis said Christians are called to comfort migrants “in their affliction and offer them mercy; to sate their hunger and thirst for justice; to let them experience God’s caring fatherliness; to show them the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
He held up the biblical image of Jacob’s ladder which starts on earth and reaches to heaven.
“I like to think that we could be those angels ascending and descending, taking under our wings the little ones, the lame, the sick, those excluded: the least ones, who would otherwise stay behind and would experience only grinding poverty on earth, without glimpsing in this life anything of heaven’s brightness.”
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