Pope Francis vehemently denounced on Wednesday the treatment of migrants who are trying to enter Europe across the Mediterranean Sea, calling it a “grave sin” to refuse to assist migrant vessels.
During his weekly public audience in St. Peter’s Square, the pontiff declared, “There are those who work systematically and with every means to reject migrants,” the pontiff said during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
“And this, when done with conscience and responsibility, is a grave sin,” he said.
Throughout his 11-year pontificate, the pope has made numerous speeches regarding how migrants are treated.
However, he made particularly forceful remarks on Wednesday when he used Catholic terminology to describe one of the worst types of sin. Over the past 10 years, there has been much discussion in Europe about migrants from the Middle East and northern Africa who are traveling across the Mediterranean Sea in homemade dinghies or small watercraft. Since 2014, around 30,000 migrants who were crossing the Mediterranean are thought to have vanished, according to estimates from the International Organization for Migration.
On Monday, a 60-day detention order was issued for a rescue ship run by the nonprofit organization Doctors Without Borders in Italy. Authorities claimed that the ship, which had carried out multiple rescue missions on August 23, had not appropriately reported its whereabouts.
Doctors Without Borders refuted those claims. “We have been sanctioned for simply fulfilling our legal duty to save lives,” it said in a statement.
Pope Francis urged the creation of a “global governance of migration based on justice, brotherhood, and solidarity” as well as the expansion of entry points for migrants. The pope declared that “militarization of borders” would not be the solution to the problem.
The pope has been providing his weekly audiences with a series of meditations on Catholic spiritual themes in recent weeks. The pope announced at the start of his speech on Wednesday that he was delaying that series for this week in order to give thought to “people who are crossing seas and deserts to find a place where they can live in peace and security.”
The 87-year-old Francis’s audience on Wednesday was his final before he leaves next week for an extensive four-country tour of Southeast Asia, which runs from September 2 to September 13.
The pontiff, who now frequently uses a wheelchair due to knee and back discomfort, is traveling farther than he has ever gone.
