• Migrants, Pope's appeal: humanitarian corridors immediately
  • Migrants: for the Pope, the world is increasingly cruel with the excluded

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08 July 2019 Migrants "are people, not just social or migratory issues! They are not just migrants. In the double sense that migrants are first and foremost human beings, and that today they are the symbol of all the discarded of the globalized society ". The Pope said this in the homily of the Mass dedicated to migrants and their rescuers on the sixth anniversary of his visit to Lampedusa.

"On this sixth anniversary of my visit to Lampedusa, my thoughts go to the 'last' who cry out to the Lord every day, asking to be freed from the evils that afflict them". Thus Pope Francis during the Mass for migrants in St. Peter's. "They are the last ones deceived and abandoned to die in the desert; they are the last tortured, abused and raped in the detention camps; they are the last ones who challenge the waves of a merciless sea; they are the last left in camps of too long a reception for to be called temporary - he recalls - they are only some of the last that Jesus asks us to love and to raise ". "Unfortunately, the existential suburbs of our cities are densely populated with people who have been discarded, marginalized, oppressed, discriminated against, abused, exploited, abandoned, poor and suffering.

"The weakest and most vulnerable must be helped" and "it is a great responsibility, from which no one can be exempt". It is God himself who has revealed "the need for a preferential option for the last, which must be given first place in the exercise of charity".

No one for God is "foreign" or "excluded". Thus Pope Francis opens the mass celebrated in St. Peter's Basilica for migrants and their rescuers, on the sixth anniversary of his visit to Lampedusa. "O God, the Father of all men, for you no one is a stranger, no one is excluded from your paternity; he looks with love at the refugees, the exiles, the victims of segregation, and the abandoned and defenseless children, so that he may be given to all the warmth of a home and a homeland, and to us a sensitive and generous heart towards the poor and the oppressed, "said Francis.