We share the responsibility for the deaths of desperate migrants when we stand by silently, Pope Francis has said, urging Catholics to see migrants not in legalistic terms but as fellow human beings with their own inherent dignity and abilities to contribute to their new homes.
Speaking on the World Day for Migrants and Refugees, the Pope said that migration is a structural reality in today’s world, with the present “emergency phase” needing to be addressed through the provision of “programmes which address the causes of migration and the changes it entails, including its effect on the makeup of societies and peoples”.
In his address, entitled ‘Migrants and Refugees Challenge Us: The Response of the Gospel of Mercy”, the Pontiff warned that “indifference and silence lead to complicity whenever we stand by as people are dying of suffocation, starvation, violence and shipwreck”, and asked whether there was anyone who did not want “a better, more decent and prosperous life to share with our loved ones”.
Recalling how the Bible urges us to welcome strangers, in whose faces “we see the face of Christ himself”, the Holy Father stressed that “welcoming others means welcoming God in person”. Despite this, he said, there continue to be debates over the reception of migrants, these disagreements not merely being conducted nationally and internationally but also at the level of “parish communities whose traditional tranquillity seems to be threatened”.
Established communities and new migrants must face these challenges together, the Pope said, such that integration can enrich both groups, preventing “the danger of discrimination, racism, extreme nationalism or xenophobia”.
Migrants must gratefully respect the “material and spiritual heritage of the host country, obeying its laws and helping with its needs”, he said, while efforts should be made to help the countries being fled, and to form public opinion in host countries to ward off “unwarranted fears and speculations detrimental to migrants”.
The address followed a statement from Germany’s bishops in the aftermath of numerous complaints of attacks and sexual assaults, reportedly by large groups of North African men, in German cities on New Year’s Eve.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the German bishops’ conference and a member of the Pope’s council of cardinal advisers, said “the excesses in Cologne and other large cities are deeply disturbing for our society and can in no way be tolerated”. Calling for “accurate information”, he warned that “these new forms of violence and especially the inhumane treatment of women cannot be tolerated”.
According to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, an estimated 27,000 migrants are being housed in Italy’s parishes, monasteries, and other religious institutions, 4,000 more than September, when the Holy Father asked that every parish in Europe host a refugee family.