Pope Francis spoke out on Sunday against the “rejection” of refugees by many Europeans.
The pontiff used his Easter address to urge people to offer “welcome and assistance” to those fleeing war and poverty, as Europe struggled with its worst migration crisis since World War II.
Countries along Europe’s “Balkan route” have toughened their stance on migrants in recent weeks, closing their borders to those seeking to transit in search of a better life in the continent’s wealthier northern states.
The shutdown has led to a bottleneck at the Greece-Macedonia frontier, where the Greek authorities have been trying to evacuate an estimated 11,500 people stranded at the squalid Idomeni camp.
During Good Friday prayers, the pope decried what he called Europe’s “indifferent and anaesthetised conscience” over migrants and on Sunday he took up the theme again.
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“The Easter message of the risen Christ… invites us not to forget those men and women seeking a better future, an ever more numerous throng of migrants and refugees… fleeing from war, hunger, poverty and social injustice,” he said.
“All too often, these brothers and sisters of ours meet along the way with death or, in any event, rejection by those who could offer them welcome and assistance.” Francis has long called for the global community to open its doors to refugees and fight xenophobia — appeals which have intensified since a controversial EU-Turkey deal aimed at stemming the flow of migrants.
In his Easter address, the pope also referred to Syria’s “lengthy conflict, with its sad wake of destruction, death, contempt for humanitarian law”, voicing hope for a positive result from UN-brokered peace talks that opened in Geneva in mid-March and are to resume in April.
Syria’s five-year conflict has killed more than 270,000 people and forced millions to flee their homes, with neighbouring countries bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis.
Influx slows
The United Nations and human rights groups have condemned the EU-Turkey deal as unethical and possibly illegal, but it appears to have dramatically slowed the tide of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the Greek islands.
Before the deal, thousands of migrants were landing every day on the islands. This week, this number fell to 600 on Tuesday, 260 on Wednesday and zero on Thursday.
Greek authorities have used the relative calm to put in place logistics to send people back to Turkey, including the deployment of 4,000 security personnel and asylum experts.
Security was tight as Francis presided over an Easter mass with huge crowds gathered below the central balcony in St Peter’s Basilica, in which he spoke of a spate of recent attacks, including Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels that killed 30 people.
He condemned “terrorism, that blind and brutal form of violence which continues to shed blood in different parts of the world, as in the recent attacks in Belgium, Turkey, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Ivory Coast”.
“With the weapons of love, God has defeated selfishness and death,” the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said. The 79-year-old Argentine pontiff urged people to channel the hope of Easter in order to defeat “the evil that seems to have the upper hand in the life of so many people”.
The former king and queen of Belgium, Albert II and Paola, who is Italian, attended the Mass and the pope greeted them afterwards.
