Pope Francis Calls On Europe to Welcome Migrants During Refugee Camp Visit

Pope Francis visited a refugee camp in Greece on the frontier of Europe’s migration routes and called on the continent to welcome people seeking asylum from war and other humanitarian disasters.

“I ask every man and woman, all of us, to overcome the paralysis of fear, the indifference that kills, the cynical disregard that nonchalantly condemns to death those on the fringes,” the pope said on Sunday morning, during a visit to the center on the Greek island of Lesbos, which houses more than 2,000 refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.

Many other people have died trying to reach Lesbos and other Greek islands by sea. “The Mediterranean, which for millennia has brought different peoples and distant lands together, is now becoming a grim cemetery without tombstones,” the pope said.

It was Pope Francis’s second visit to Lesbos. In April 2016, at the height of Europe’s migration crisis, he visited a notoriously overcrowded camp on the island, meeting with migrants and lamenting their “tragic and indeed desperate need.” In a surprise move, he then returned to Rome with 12 Syrian refugees.

Greece has for years been a major point of entry into Europe for people fleeing war-torn or impoverished parts of neighboring continents. The country has heightened security on its land and sea borders with Turkey to reduce the number of asylum seekers. Greece has denied allegations from human-rights groups, international media and officials from the European Union and the United Nations that it is illegally pushing back asylum seekers into Turkey.

The pope’s Lesbos visit came on the fourth day of his five-day papal visit to Cyprus and Greece, which has highlighted migration, a signature issue of the current pontificate.

Pope Francis, who was accompanied at the camp on Lesbos by Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, said “with deep regret, we must admit that this country, like others, continues to be hard-pressed, and that in Europe there are others who persist in treating the problem as a matter that does not concern them.”

Those words echoed the pope’s remarks on Saturday, in a speech at the presidential palace in Athens, when he lamented the “nationalistic selfishness” that he said was blocking a coordinated response by European states and called on them to accept migrants “according to the possibilities of each country.”

The pope entered the Lesbos camp on foot, pausing frequently to greet residents along his path, many of them families with children. Most of the migrants wore masks but the pope didn’t. Pope Francis, who turns 85 this month and frequently walks with a limp because of nerve pain in his leg, held on to the arm of a priest beside him for support.

Christian Tango Mukalya, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo and a resident of the camp since November 2020, addressed the pope briefly during a welcoming ceremony. He said that he was the father of three small children, two of whom were with him in the camp. He had lost contact with the other child and their mother, he said.

The pope addressed a group of asylum seekers and visited some of the camp’s residents at their living quarters in temporary structures along the seafront.

On Friday in Cyprus, the pope decried a culture of indifference to migrants but acknowledged that the small island country was limited in its ability to handle an influx of undocumented arrivals, which Cyprus’s government says have increased by almost 40% this year over 2020.

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades thanked Pope Francis on Thursday for offering to take 50 migrants from Cyprus. The Vatican confirmed on Friday that 12 of those migrants would be moved to Italy in the coming weeks.