Pope joins call to aid refugees
He says more needed than just sympathizing.
Pope Francis said Europe’s Catholics should do more than just welcome Middle Eastern asylum-seekers.
Pope Francis said Sunday that Catholics should not only welcome asylum-seekers to Europe, but also give them shelter and help them begin new lives.
In a span of 24 hours from early Saturday to early Sunday, more than 13,000 people made their way into Germany via its border with Austria, the biggest number of them from war-racked Syria, but with large contingents of Afghans and Eritreans as well.
And at the southern end of the migrant trail, refugees continued to arrive en masse in Greece, having made the short but dangerous sea voyage from Turkey. The crush has fallen heavily on the tiny Greek tourist islands, with clashes breaking out Sunday between migrants and police on the island of Lesbos.
Germany, the chosen destination of many, sought not to let too heavy a burden fall on any region, arranging trains and jam-packing regu- lar ones to carry them to Dortmund in the west, Dresden in the east and Hamburg in the north.
On a morning train from Vienna, the Austrian capital, to Munich in southern Germany, asylum-seekers checked the GPS on their mobile phones to make sure they had crossed into Germany, so low-key was the passing of the frontier. A crowd of well-wishers gathered at Munich’s train station, waving welcome signs, and the arrivals waved back — though a police cordon separated them.
The refugees were given medical checks in tents set up in a square beside the station.
In St. Peter’s Square, the pope said it was not enough to merely sympathize with those brought to Europe’s shores by convulsions of war and hardship. He called on every Roman Catholic parish to shelter refugees, saying the Vatican itself would take in two families.
“The gospel calls us to be close to the smallest, and to those who have been abandoned,” Francis said, according to Vatican radio.
Throughout the weekend, migrants and refugees were greeted by Austrian officials and volunteers as they crossed over from Hungary, where many had encountered harsh treatment at the hands of the authorities.
At a train station in Vienna, a woman in a long black abaya emblazoned with a makeshift badge saying in three languages that she spoke Arabic, German and English spoke gently to an exhausted-looking mother of an infant and a toddler. Another woman, in a red jacket bearing the logo of the charity Caritas, guided a man to the ticket counter, his three school-age girls following like ducklings.
A young engineering student, Mustafa Abdul Qader, from Aleppo, Syria, said he hoped to make it all the way to Britain. But after a harrow- ing start to his journey — eight hours in the water after the raft carrying him from Turkey to Greece capsized — he said he was happy just to be in the European Union and out of physical danger.
“A shower sometime will be nice,” he said.
Those who managed to leave Hungary on more than 100 buses that took them to the Austrian frontier considered themselves lucky. Hungary said the bus service Saturday was a one-time measure to keep refugees on foot from clogging the roads and posing a safety hazard. By Sunday, more new arrivals had flooded into Budapest and tensions were again rising.