-
World Day of Migrants and Refugees
The Church has been celebrating the World Day of Migrants and Refugees (WDMR) since 1914. It is always an occasion to express concern for different vulnerable people on the move; to pray for them as they face many challenges; and to increase awareness about the opportunities that migration offers.
Every year the WDMR is the last Sunday of September; in 2022 it will be celebrated on 25 September. As the title for his annual message, the Holy Father has chosen “Building the Future with Migrants and Refugees”.
For more information and resources vist the Official World Day of Migrants and Refugees Website -
Pope Francis Is Still Trying to Call Attention to the Migrant Crisis
In March, 2020, the Vatican opened its archives pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII. Scholars have sought access to the long-withheld documents, which number in the hundreds of thousands, in the hope of gaining a clearer understanding of Pius’s actions and disposition during the Second World War. The Pope, in his many public statements during the war, made no direct reference to the Nazis’ murderous campaign against European Jews. Did Pius decline to speak out because he was loath to antagonize the Nazis while he worked behind the scenes to save Jewish lives (as his advocates insist), because he failed to grasp the full extent of their genocidal aims, or because a long history of Catholic anti-Semitism left him and his advisers coolly indifferent to the suffering of Jews and led them to downplay reports of massacres and mass deportations? It will take years for scholars to review all the documents and reach conclusions. Regardless of Pius’s motives, his silence is still unsettled and unsettling.
Eighty years later, Europe is confronted with a humanitarian crisis, and this time there is no question about what the Pope thinks. This crisis involves migration to Europe from points east and south, by people seeking refuge from grinding wars in Syria and Afghanistan, or rendered desperate by corrupt governments and scarce resources in sub-Saharan Africa. The situation is not a Holocaust, but it echoes the European crises of that period. According to a United Nations report, just prior to the pandemic, nearly seventy million people around the world had been displaced by war and violence. That was the highest number in some seventy years, since tens of millions were displaced by the Second World War and the subsequent partitioning of Europe and the South Asian subcontinent. In recent days, for example, two boats carrying refugees bound for Europe were shipwrecked off the coast of Libya, and more than a hundred and sixty of them drowned, making a total of roughly fifteen hundred refugees who have died that way in 2021. Many refugees today are impeded by the E.U.’s quota system or detained for lack of proper identification, left as displaced people in squalid camps and rendered stateless—or held in secretive prisons in third countries, notably Libya, with the full knowledge of the European Union. And now, as then, politicians—in Hungary, Poland, Austria, France, and Italy—insist that migrants pose a threat to the historic character of Europe. At stake are questions of what makes a European and how European history bears on one’s stance toward people whose origins lie elsewhere.
-