Pope challenges Europe to live up to its human rights ideals
Pope Francis ventured yesterday into one of the grimmest places in Europe, a razor wire-fenced camp for asylum seekers on this island in the Aegean sea, and told the people held there that Europe’s response has been defensive and inhumane, and has fallen short of its purported values.
‘‘Human lives, real people, are at stake!’’ Francis said, in some of his most pleading words on a topic that has defined his pontificate.
For many at the camp, sealed off from the outside world, their plight hidden, Francis’s visit punctured the bubble. Asylum seekers lined up before the pontiff’s arrival and reached to touch him or hug him when he exited the popemobile.
Unmasked, and at times relying on a nearby priest for support walking, the pontiff spent 20 minutes shaking hundreds of hands.
And yet in returning for the first time in five years to this island at the front line of Europe’s immigration response, Francis also confronted the limits of his own ability to influence opinions and shape policy. His ideas, once part of a European debate over the proper approach to migration from Afghanistan, Syria and other countries, now run clearly counter to the continent’s political mainstream.
And a recent flash point on the border with Belarus showed the prevailing sentiment in the bloc: Keep migrants from entering.
Francis, speaking in a white tent with several dozen migrants, vented his frustration. Progress on migration, he said, has been ‘‘terribly absent.’’ He called it an ‘‘illusion’’ to think a society could safeguard itself without helping those who ‘‘knock at our door.’’ He said respect for human rights should be upheld – ‘‘especially on this continent, which is constantly promoting them worldwide.’’
‘‘Let us stop ignoring reality,’’ Francis said. ‘‘How many conditions exist that are unworthy of human beings? How many hotspots (are there) where migrants and refugees live in borderline conditions, without glimpsing solutions on the horizon?’’