Pope Leo XIV warned people smugglers on Friday that they will face God’s wrath for exploiting the desperation of migrants, demanding they stop and repent during his final day in the Canary Islands, a key point of entry for migrants making the perilous Atlantic crossing from West Africa.
A Call to Action
For the second day in a row, the American pope insisted on the inherent dignity and rights of migrants and demanded they be welcomed and integrated into society, in some of his strongest comments on the issue. “Break those chains and free those you hold in bondage,” Leo said in a message to human traffickers that he delivered during a meeting with humanitarian aid organizations.
Leo directed his remarks to the criminal organizations and individual smugglers who organize these “death routes” to Europe. Such smugglers charge thousands of euros a person and often force their passengers into prostitution or other forms of black market labor by withholding their documents to pay off the debt.
A Warning to Traffickers
“Stop. Repent,” Leo said in his message to traffickers, emphasizing each word in Spanish and drawing a sustained applause from the crowd. “For every life lost, every family deceived, every body subjugated, every woman threatened, every worker exploited, you will have to appear before divine justice.”
The pope had been fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit the islands to commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea. He is also drawing attention to the Catholic Church’s biblically-mandated mantra to “welcome the stranger,” amid anti-migrant sentiment in Europe and the Trump administration’s mass deportation program in his native United States.
During the encounter with aid groups in Tenerife, Leo implored receiving communities to integrate people fleeing war, poverty, and climate change and spare them from the “silent shipwreck” of abandonment when they are left on the streets with nothing after surviving perilous crossings.
A human conscience, and even more so a Christian conscience, cannot remain indifferent in the face of these graveyards of the sea, to the victims of shipwrecks and the lack of aid, Leo said. “Every life lost on these routes is a failure for the human family.”
Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.
