Father Gianfranco Grieco comments on the Pope's visit to the first periphery of the Mediterranean, on Monday, July 8th
The office manager of our Dicastery, Fr. Gianfranco Grieco, of the Conventual Friars, among other things, recipient of the Caravella Award for Journalists of the Mediterranean, in 2011, comments for the website of the Pontifical Council on the Family Pope Francis’ first pastoral visit of outside Rome, on Monday, July 8th, to the island of Lampedusa, where he will meet the families of immigrants and refugees.
«Pope Francis has chosen one of the most agonizing “periphery’s” of the Mediterranean for his first pastoral visit outside Rome, on Monday, July 8th, 2013. During this three-hour visit—from 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.—the gaze of the tender and loving father and pastor of the universal Church will repose on the suffering faces of many thousands of men, women, children and elderly people, who have fled their homeland in search of a new life and freedom. Wounded, scattered and divided families, families who have been annihilated, families who have disappeared: these are the sad and shocking realities of a time, our time, where it is not easy to pass from ads and programs to concrete action and solidarity.
Lampedusa has been and continues to be for many people the goal of a dream that turns into gruesome reality, if hospitality, solidarity and love are irrevocably absent. The Pope, who is familiar with the “peripheries” of the world, intends to immerse himself in this sad and tragic reality of the Mediterranean, in order to say that he wants first of all to be close to those who are forgotten, offended, wounded and oppressed by the neglect and malice of opulent countries. The poor—“remember the poor!”—was the warning of the Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes immediately after his election to the Chair of Peter. Remember the poor and the last: this is also the invitation that Pope Francis addresses to the powerful countries of the Northern Hemisphere and to those whose hearts remain closed to the destitute and to the urgent needs of people who suffer wretchedness and are dying of hunger and thirst.
3,648 immigrants have arrived on the island in recent months, nearly half of the approximately 8,000, who have come to all the Italian coasts since the beginning of 2013. In the entire year of 2012, only 4,019 suffering people landed there; 300 died on April 6th, 2011, when, 40 miles offshore from the island, their boat sank and turned into a graveyard in the midst of the stormy sea. This was one of the most tragic disasters in the Strait of Sicily in recent years. A month later, another boat, with nearly 500 Africans, was saved by the considerate intervention of the population. In February 2011, arrivals of North Africans were constant and massive. Each day there were hundreds of migrants and refugees, and for 58 days the island was transformed into a huge open-air reception center, where thousands of North Africans were sleeping in makeshift camps and in buildings that continue to have the sad smell of the ghetto and of rejection.
In the open sea, immediately after his arrival, Pope Francis, surrounded by a procession of boats, will launch a wreath in memory of those who, in these years of war and flight from their fatherland, have tragically lost their lives. Then, at Punta Favarolo, he will meet a group of migrants and refugees. He will also celebrate Holy Mass on the sports field and visit the Parish of St. Gerland, which in recent years has become the ‘heart of flesh’ of a region that wants to keep its soul open to the Mediterranean world but does not want to remain sadly alone while mourning its dead who come from afar».
