The charismatic pontificate of Pope Francis is already replete with goodwill gestures and visits. One of them has surely been his historic visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa earlier this month.
Lampedusa, which is located roughly 75 miles away from the Tunisian coast, is the island African migrants try to reach in their desperate attempt to escape from difficult economic and political situations that afflict their respective countries. The migrants often risk their lives on that treacherous sea voyage. It is said that around 20,000 people have lost their lives trying to enter the country.
After laying a wreath in the sea to commemorate the victims and meeting a group of migrants who shared their troubled experiences with him, Pope Francis celebrated an open air Mass in Lampedusa. Around 10,000 people turned out for it. In his powerful homily, the Argentinean Pontiff said his main reason for visiting Lampedusa was not only to show solidarity with the migrants but also to awaken the consciences of us Europeans to act concretely in the situation. “I felt that I had to come here today, to pray and to offer a sign of my closeness, but also to challenge our consciences lest this tragedy be repeated. Please, let it not be repeated!”
Why so? The reason is that the immigrants who are dying at sea in boats that from vehicles of hope are immediately turned into vehicles of death are human beings, like you and me, created by God. The bible offers two important questions addressed by God to the human being.
The first one is: “Adam, where are you?” The second one: “Cain, where is your brother?”
The Holy Father said the two questions challenge everybody, including himself, to repent the indifferent attitude that many are nourishing towards the plight of the suffering, involving of course the boat people. “God’s two questions echo even today, as forcefully as ever! How many of us, myself included, have lost our bearings; we are no longer attentive to the world in which we live; we don’t care; we don’t protect what God created for everyone, and we end up unable even to care for one another! And when humanity as a whole loses its bearings, it results in tragedies like the one we have witnessed.”
The sin of indifference is making us disregard our responsibility for the blood that is being spilled by these brothers and sisters. The culture of comfort, which is dominating our European continent, is fashioning our thinking into the most repressive individualistic type of reasoning which rejects any kind of solidarity with the suffering.
Thus Pope Francis commented: “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours? Nobody! That is our answer: It isn’t me; I don’t have anything to do with it; it must be someone else, but certainly not me. Yet God is asking each of us: ‘Where is the blood of your brother which cries out to me?’ Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the Levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor soul…!’, and then go on our way.
“It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged”.
The Bishop of Rome exhorted that a serious conversion from such a “globalization of indifference” includes repentance from the catastrophic sin of our indifference and cruelty of heart and interceding for the change of heart of those whose social and economic decisions caused all this misery in the lives of millions of people.
“We beg forgiveness for our indifference to so many of our brothers and sisters. Father, we ask your pardon for those who are complacent and closed amid comforts which have deadened their hearts; we beg your forgiveness for those who by their decisions on the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies. Forgive us, Lord!”
Mario Attard OFM Cap
SAN GWANN