Pope Francis washes the feet of migrants and refugees during Holy Thursday Mass March 24, 2016. / L’Osservatore Romano.
CNA Staff, May 6, 2021 / 06:10 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Thursday that “aggressive forms of nationalism and radical individualism,” exposed during the pandemic, are having a severe impact on migrants worldwide.
In his message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, issued May 6, he said that the coronavirus crisis had highlighted the deep divisions between human beings.
“Our ‘we,’ both in the wider world and within the Church, is crumbling and cracking due to myopic and aggressive forms of nationalism and radical individualism,” he said.
“And the highest price is being paid by those who most easily become viewed as others: foreigners, migrants, the marginalized, those living on the existential peripheries.”
The World Day of Migrants and Refugees, instituted in 1914 by Pope Pius X, is celebrated annually on the last Sunday in September. This year it falls on Sept. 26.
In his message for the day’s 107th commemoration, entitled “Towards an ever wider ‘we’,” Pope Francis addressed what he called a “twofold appeal,” to Catholics and the wider world, to embrace those on the margins.
He urged Catholics “to make the Church become ever more inclusive.”
“In our day,” he wrote, “the Church is called to go out into the streets of every existential periphery in order to heal wounds and to seek out the straying, without prejudice or fear, without proselytizing, but ready to widen her tent to embrace everyone.”
“Among those dwelling in those existential peripheries, we find many migrants and refugees, displaced persons and victims of trafficking, to whom the Lord wants his love to be manifested and his salvation preached.”
He appealed to those outside the Church to work with Catholics to build “a future of justice and peace.”
“Our societies will have a ‘colorful’ future, enriched by diversity and by cultural exchanges. Consequently, we must even now learn to live together in harmony and peace,” he commented.
He continued: “Today’s migration movements offer an opportunity for us to overcome our fears and let ourselves be enriched by the diversity of each person’s gifts. Then, if we so desire, we can transform borders into privileged places of encounter, where the miracle of an ever wider ‘we’ can come about.”
The pope argued that greater solidarity was also necessary “to ensure the proper care of our common home.”
He said: “Ours must be a personal and collective commitment that cares for all our brothers and sisters who continue to suffer, even as we work towards a more sustainable, balanced and inclusive development.”
“A commitment that makes no distinction between natives and foreigners, between residents and guests, since it is a matter of a treasure we hold in common, from whose care and benefits no one should be excluded.”
In an intervention prepared for a Vatican press conference launching the pope’s message, Cardinal Michael Czerny noted that the text developed themes in the pope’s latest encyclical, Fratelli tutti.
Referring to the pandemic, he said: “We are all suffering in different ways. What happens when the survivors in a lifeboat must all help to row to shore? What if some take more than their share of the rations, leaving others too weak to row? The risk is that everyone will perish, the well-fed and the starving alike.”
Czerny, the under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, added: “Widening the Good Samaritan attitude — overcoming selfishness and caring for all — is essential to survival.”
During the press conference, a video campaign for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees was presented, featuring Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso describing the situation on the border between Mexico and the United States.
He said: “I’ve found the most rewarding opportunities of my life serving here at the border. I’ve learned that borders can be vibrant places of encounter and welcome — encounters that enrich us. I’ve learned that we are all interconnected as one human family. We stand or fall together. We build walls and fences which divide us. Today people of faith need to be bridge builders.”
Speaking via video link, Bishop Paul McAleenan, an auxiliary bishop of the English diocese of Westminster, said that the pope’s message offered encouragement to Catholics in the U.K.
He said: “Pope Francis draws our attention to the interconnectedness of humanity: my decisions and actions here affect others who are far away.”
“Three areas in particular directly affect the human family today. The decision of the United Kingdom to reduce its aid budget compounds the suffering of the world’s poorest. Nations engaging in the arms trade bring endless misery to those in places of conflict. Our contribution to the climate emergency results in droughts, disasters and displacement thousands of miles away. Understanding the reasons for migration must include the acknowledgement that we are not blameless.”
Also speaking via video link, Sarah Teather, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, said that in her work she witnessed the lack of solidarity that Pope Francis described in his message.
“Faced with those who fled their homes and sought sanctuary, the asylum system builds walls of suspicion to stop them receiving the protection they need,” she explained.
“It detains them and enforces destitution. Destitution makes many vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and they speak of the sense of losing themselves through years struggling at the margins.”
She highlighted the success of a project in which religious congregations and families welcome homeless asylum seekers into their homes.
She said: “Together, they create a counter-culture to the hostile public policies that render people homeless and marginalized.”
“In small, concrete ways, we can all participate in this shared project to recompose a common human family. For there are treasures to be found when we strive together to break down walls that divide us. The dream of one human family is a dream worth realizing.”
Pope Francis closed his World Day of Migrants and Refugees message with an appeal to people to “dream together” of a better future for all humanity.
He concluded with a prayer:
Holy, beloved Father,
your Son Jesus taught us
that there is great rejoicing in heaven
whenever someone lost is found,
whenever someone excluded, rejected or discarded
is gathered into our “we”,
which thus becomes ever wider.
We ask you to grant the followers of Jesus,
and all people of good will,
the grace to do your will on earth.
Bless each act of welcome and outreach
that draws those in exile
into the “we” of community and of the Church,
so that our earth may truly become
what you yourself created it to be:
the common home of all our brothers and sisters. Amen.
[…]
““We focus on sex and then we do not give weight to social injustice, slander, gossip and lies.”
We focus on sex becaust at the moment that is the sin that is being pushed most, with claims tha sexual sin is not evil and that we must be “tolerant.”
“Have you never seen young priests all stiff in black cassocks and hats in the shape of the planet Saturn on their heads? Behind all the rigid clericalism there are serious problems.””
There are a lot fewer problems with them, I suspect, than with the young priests who are schlepping around in lay clothes being just one of the guys. The ones in the cassocks and with the hats are at least remembering that they are priests.
More often than not..one of the GAY guys.
Whats a BILLION babies murdered by abortion to this Pope….just a chance to bash Catholics who take the faith seriously.
As we have come to endure, Pope Francis makes one good point by unmaking another. No, clericalism is NOT a “fixation on sexual morality”…
Instead, clericalism–as the collared form of domination–is rooted in lust. The height of clericalism in all its forms is to appropriate what is not our own.
From St. Paul: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (1 Cor 6:19). And this from St. Augustine who, from early personal experience, surely knew what he was talking about:
“But to return to the word ‘lust’. As lust for revenge is called anger, so lust for money is avarice, lust to win at any price is obstinacy, lust for bragging is vanity. And there are still many other kinds of lust, some with names and some without. For example, it would be difficult to find a specific name for that lust for domination [clericalism!]which plays such havoc with the souls of the ambitious soldiers and comes to light in every civil war” (Book XIV, Ch. 15).
The Church itself is now in civil war–betrayed by the lust of an evasive “clericalism” that would enable and normalize the homosexual subculture even within the Church! There’s also the insight, maybe from a former pope, that while perhaps overrated in itself, sexual failing is nevertheless an open door to all of the other fatal vices, including those now flagged by Pope Francis (“social injustice, slander, gossip, lies”).
“Have you never seen young priests all stiff in black cassocks and hats in the shape of the planet Saturn on their heads? Behind all the rigid clericalism there are serious problems.” Truly, the hatefulness of this man knows no bounds. He sees modesty and virtue, devotion and piety, self-effacement and discipline with a jaundiced and sickly eye!
Francis is preparing the soil for what comes out of the German Synod.
I am very touched by Pope Francis humanity. He is wonderful gift to the church and the word. A true shepherd.
Marxists are always probing for weaknesses in the society they wish to destroy. Extreme poverty is inexcusable but Marxism draws its diabolical strength from envy. Sexual immorality leads to poverty of unwed mothers or abandoned wives and children, AIDS and other STDs and abortion. Sexual immorality has destroyed western civilization.
And yet, so much of the focus on sexual immorality concerns homosexuality rather than adultery or straight up fornication. No woman was ever left an unwed mother due to homosexual activity.
No woman was ever left an unwed mother due to homosexual activity.
You conveniently omitted the caveat “that I know of.”
And yet, so much of the focus on sexual immorality concerns homosexuality rather than adultery or straight up fornication.
80%+ of abuse committed by sexual deviants masquerading as Catholic Priests involves homosexual ephebophilia. The Pontiff might be capable of multitasking – although that remains in doubt – but he needs to first purge the seminaries, consecrated religious and Priesthood of homosexuals before he can have any credibility judging the sinful behavior of adulterers and fornicators.
OMG!
A true shepherd.
A true shepherd wouldn’t cultivate schism.
Pope Francis is The best pope we have had in my lifetime and I was born 15 yrs before the death of Pius XII.
“We focus on sex and then we do not give weight to social injustice, slander, gossip and lies. The Church today needs a profound conversion in this area,” the pope said. Most of the young priests in cassocks coming out of the seminaries unscathed by those clerics that the clericalists won’t remove are in fact well balanced in morality, liturgy, and charity. If things can be said of a priest who does not know his flock, what should be said of a Pope who does not know his priests.
Pope Francis is right, fundamentalism and Catholic fundamentalists spend way too much focus on sexuality and ignore the worst sins going on in the world! it’s time for people to reread what Jesus had to say about what’s really important
Blaise Cupich, is that you?
At least we have a clue as to why PF did nothing about McCarrick, did not respond to the Dubia, protected his abusive friend Bishops in South America, and told the American Bishops to take a hike when they tried to convene to do something about the 2018 summer of shame clerical sexual abuses. He just doesn’t see Greed and Lust as being that bad at all, despite them still being on the list of capital sins.
Based on the Pope’s statements, I guess that he must regard Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the virgin saints as being too sexually rigid. By his non-standards their chastity must be completely unacceptable to the modernist wing of the Church.
The millions of lives lost to abortion and the millions more ruined by the sexual revolution (which includes persons sexually abused by Priests who have betrayed their vow of celibacy) are far more important and a far more immediate threat to the world than climate change or migrants.
“… Have you never seen young priests all stiff in black cassocks and hats in the shape of the planet Saturn on their heads? Behind all the rigid clericalism there are serious problems.”
The Pontiff’s tendency to utter foolish, nonbinding, prudential statements and his well documented apathy and indifference to the heretics polluting the clerical state are legitimate, serious problems not the traditional head gear and clerical attire worn by faithful Priests.
ACTION ITEM! SATURNOS FOR CLERICS!
“We focus on sex and then we do not give weight to social injustice, slander, gossip and lies”. Unless the Pontiff has discovered a new sanctification for the Christian and for all persons historically personal holiness is what initiates authentic compassion for the underprivileged and the environment evidenced in Medieval Catholicism’s initiating hospital care for the poor, monastic advancements in agricultural development, care of animals Francis of Assisi a prime example. The dearth of effective response in the world at present is due precisely to secularist global organizations and their benefactors who persistently foster a political agenda of unprincipled morality in guise of freedom [Catholicism has been verbally attacked by senior UN officials for being against contraception and abortion – although some Catholic agencies have succumbed especially in support of tho Pontiff]. It is reducible to conversion to a secular humanist vision that inhibits convincing response. What viable impact has the ‘brotherhood’ of secular socialists had? George Soros a prime example who had said he is like God. Because Pope Francis follows his bidding in principle. Certainly there is evidence of parallel interests and known monetary support to Church social justice programs and nominal Catholic political candidates. Abortion on the demand focus off traditional family structure acceptance of where you’re at morally. Except if you’re rigid wear a cassock teach the truth on sexual morality – not the gravest yet the most prolific sin the likely major cause for eternal condemnation.