Throughout this month of 2024, the Pope invites us to pray for migrants. In many countries, war is present. Families are forced to flee to stay alive. As a result, they experience ‘a feeling of being uprooted, of not knowing where they belong’, Pope Francis tells us. Some in their host countries regard them with contempt, fear and concern. Yet we have to be hospitable to one another.
Welcoming migrants
We are all children of the same Father and Christ’s command is to be close to one another. The Pope therefore asks us to unite our prayers with his so that these migrants may find hospitality as well as new life opportunities. As Christians, it is up to us not to build walls. We know that when we create opportunities for encounters, we build bridges. It is then that peace, concord and hospitality become possible. The Pope calls us to this urgency of hospitality and to the realisation that everything is connected. So, ‘either we all save ourselves, or no one is saved’, Francis reminds us.
Showing humanity and fraternity
During his visit to Marseilles in 2023, Pope Francis called on us Europeans to show humanity and fraternity. “On the one hand, fraternity, which fecundates the human community with goodness; on the other, indifference, which causes bloodshed in the Mediterranean. We are at a crossroads of civilisations…’ he tells us. In the Society of Evangelical Life of the Heart of Jesus, we cannot be indifferent to the issue of migrants. Many of us are professionally or voluntarily involved in the service of these women, men and children who have had to flee hunger and war. For example, in issue 11 of our Projet de Vie we read:
In the midst of solidarities and divisions, solitudes and fraternities, Jesus offers us a heart-to-heart with him. He comes to live Nazareth in each of us and to seize us at the deep roots of our being (PdV n°11)
God walks with his people
When we are concerned about migrants, refugees, displaced persons we remember that ‘The Holy Family had to take refuge in a foreign land because the life of the Child Jesus was in danger’ (Card. Michael Czerny – prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Human Development Integral). Thus, these migrants are fully members of the human family. they are neither numbers nor statistics. The international director of the Pope’s Global Prayer Network, Jesuit Frédéric Fornos, invites us to ‘find solutions based on compassion and respect for human dignity. This perspective is born of the Gospel and prayer, and the Church’s magisterium reminds us of this”.
‘Whoever welcomes a migrant welcomes Christ’
When migrants are perceived with concern and fear, the Pope tells us, ‘it is then that the spectre of walls appears: walls erected on the land, separating families, and walls in hearts’.
