Pope Offers Mass on Island Beacon for Refugees

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/europe/pope-offers-mass-on-island-beacon-for-refugees.html

Version 0 of 1.

ROME — Pope Francis traveled on Monday to Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island that has become a gateway to Europe for thousands of desperate asylum seekers and migrants, as well as an unknown number of others who have died during the perilous crossing from North Africa.

It was the pope’s first official trip outside Rome, and he used it to draw attention to a continuing humanitarian problem while chiding the world for its indifference.

“These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to leave difficult situations to find a little serenity and peace; they sought a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death,” the pope said in the homily at a Mass attended by some 10,000 people in a large sports field. “How many times do those who seek this not find understanding, reception or solidarity?”

Upon arriving at the island, Francis threw a wreath of white and yellow flowers into the sea to commemorate the victims of a crossing that in recent years has been attempted by tens of thousands, usually at the hand of unscrupulous traffickers, traveling in overcrowded and unseaworthy fishing vessels. After the pope prayed for the dead, dozens of fishing boats that had accompanied his ship to the island’s main port sounded their horns.

“Welcome among the last,” proclaimed one banner to the pope affixed on a water tower.

New arrivals on the island, about 75 miles north of Tunisia, are fed and fingerprinted and then separated into three groups: economic migrants, who could be repatriated after their cases are reviewed, and asylum seekers and minors, who after a few days are sent to detention centers on Italy’s mainland.

Human rights organizations say that at least 1,500 people lost their lives in the Mediterranean in 2011 alone. Last year, about 500 people were reported dead or missing at sea, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

While praising volunteer associations, law enforcement officials and residents of the island for the assistance they have provided to the migrants, the pope criticized the “globalization of indifference” that he said was widespread among too many others. We “have forgotten how to cry” for migrants lost at sea and “take care of each other,” the pope said in his homily.

Officials in Lampedusa said they hoped the pope’s visit would bring attention to what they saw as a humanitarian disaster.

“This island is the setting of one of the most epochal dramas of our time, but it is ignored,” said Giuseppina Nicolini, the mayor of Lampedusa. “The numbers of those lost at sea are those of a war, but a silent war that no one speaks of, except a few blogs that no one reads.”

“No one speaks of the heartache that is acted out here,” she said.

In a telephone interview, Ms. Nicolini spoke of fishing boats crammed with 500 people, or rubber dinghies built for 20 carrying five times as many people. “Many of the landings are because of rescue operations,” she said.

Last week, the United Nations refugee agency said an estimated 7,800 migrants and asylum seekers had landed on the coast of Italy in the first six months of this year, mostly from Libya. Based on interviews with those who reached Europe, the agency has recorded some 40 deaths in the Mediterranean this year, though the peak season for crossings, typically from May to September, is far from over.

In his first four months as pope, Francis has shown that he is willing to make significant changes, shaking up institutions like the scandal-plagued Vatican bank. This trip, too, caught many by surprise, an unexpected decision made after the pope was “profoundly moved by the recent wreck involving a boat transporting migrants from Africa,” the Vatican said in a statement on July 1.

The pope has also said he wants a simpler church that shuns worldliness and instead ministers to the poor and dispossessed.

At the end of the Mass, Archbishop Francesco Montenegro of Agrigento, Sicily, described Lampedusa as the island of “hope and death,” a “reef and a lighthouse” that for too many has become a tomb. It should be a constant reminder to all people that “justice and dignity should not be suppressed.”

Before the final benediction, Pope Francis said that Lampedusa should be “a lighthouse in all the world, to have the courage to receive those who are looking for a better life.”