The “Migrant” Church of Pope Francis

This was for the Church, he specifies, the opportunity “to rediscover its itinerant nature, as the People of God journeying through history on pilgrimage, ‘migrating’, we could say, toward the Kingdom of Heaven.”

He draws on the biblical episode of the Exodus, where, for 40 years, the people of Israel, fleeing the servitude imposed by the Pharaohs of Egypt, walk through the desert toward the Promised Land. “Likewise, it is possible to see in the migrants of our time, as in those of every age, a living image of God’s people on their way to the eternal homeland.”

Francis continues: “Like the people of Israel in the time of Moses, migrants often flee from oppression, abuse, insecurity, discrimination, and lack of opportunities for development.” And he does not hesitate to affirm that many “experience God as their traveling companion, guide and anchor of salvation. [...]

“How many Bibles, copies of the Gospels, prayer books and rosaries accompany migrants on their journeys across deserts, rivers, seas and the borders of every continent!”... —Francis forgets here that many migrants are equipped with the Koran and the Misbaha and not the Bible and the Rosary.

Quoting the Gospel of St. Matthew, the Supreme Pontiff states: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” [Mt. 25:35], and comments, “the encounter with the migrant, as with every brother and sister in need, ‘is also an encounter with Christ.’”

The French journalist Laurent Dandrieu is the author of a highly acclaimed book, published in 2017: Église et immigration, le grand malaise: Le pape et le suicide de la civilisation européenne [The Church and Immigration, the Great Unease: the Pope and the Suicide of European Civilization] (Presses de la Renaissance). Interviewed on the TV Libertés channel on September 3, 2017, he spoke about the Pope’s message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2018, entitled “Welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating migrants and refugees”:

“Many people, in defense of the Pope’s remarks since the beginning of his pontificate, said that this speech was purely evangelical, that it was only advocating charity and that the Pope was completely within his role in giving this speech. Here, we see that it is a strictly political message since there were no less than 21 concrete political measures that the Pope recommended to States.”

And he adds: “The Pope stipulates that in accordance with the centrality of the human person, the security of migrants must always systematically come before national security. But there cannot be personal security without national security. And national populations are conspicuously absent from this text. [...] There is an absence of reflection and consideration of the common good, which is nevertheless the doctrine of the Church.”

Europe’s “Migratory Roots”

On June 3, 2024, during the presentation of the Pope’s message, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, responded to journalists on the migration issue before the European elections. The head of the Dicastery urged everyone not to reduce the issue to an abstract concept.

He encouraged voters to stop talking about “migrations” and instead talk about “migrants.” The Cardinal is strongly opposed to the idea that “migration is a global crisis,” even describing it as a “false” and “frightening” idea. He insisted on the need to recognize the migrant as a brother and sister, because with a little fraternity, everything would be different. He called for empathy.

Cardinal Czerny finally urged Europeans not to forget “their own migratory roots.” And he said that the “human race” was not born on the Old Continent.

On the Boulevard Voltaire website, Georges Michel brings up in an article dated June 4: “Migratory roots: a curious expression, bordering on oxymoron. We are migrants, or descended from migrants, having African, Italian, Portuguese roots (and whatever others), but we do not have migratory roots.

“As if migration were a sort of homeland. One would expect a Prince of the Church, originally from Old Europe and having migrated with his family to Canada to escape Communion, to invite Europeans to remember their Christian roots.”

It seems useful to quote here a brief extract of the analysis published in the piece “Le pape François et les migrants” [“Pope Francis and Migrants”] from Nouvelles de Chrétienté  no. 169, January-February 2018.

“In an opinion column published on the Figaro website, on January 23, 2017, sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté sided with Laurent Dandrieu in his fundamental debate on immigration. [...] Dandrieu, he concludes, also wonders what the Church gains from disdaining the peoples who, historically, have confided in her.

“In wanting to appear absolutely universal, has Catholicism forgotten the intimate and even irreplaceable link that it has established with European civilization? We are right to fear the dechristianization of Europe. But we can also fear the de-Europeanization of Christianity.

“As Dandrieu notes, Pope Francis, who has decided that the future of Catholicism is found in the margins, does not seem very interested in the margins of European civilization, being those millions of dechristianized French people, who nevertheless still carry with them not nostalgia for a Christian world but for a world where the cross still meant something. Are the only peripheries that matter exotic?”

Historical Review

While millions of Italians have been emigrating since the end of the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII recalls the Church’s disapproval of migrations in his Encyclical Quam ærumnosa (December 10, 1888). While he also highlights the Church’s obligation to support so many souls who expose themselves to evils worse than the previous ones.

“It is, indeed, piteous that so many unhappy sons of Italy, driven by want to seek another land, should encounter ills greater than those from which they would fly. And it often happens that to the toils of every kind by which their physical life is wasted, is added the far more wretched ruin of their souls.

“The very first voyage of the emigrants is full of perils and hardships, for they fall for the most part into the hands of avaricious traders, whose slaves they in a manner are [...] When they reach the lands for which they are destined, ignorant as they are of the language and the place, and hired out for daily labour, they fall into the hands of the dishonest, and into the snares of those more powerful men to whom they enslave themselves. [...]

“Considering these things with care, and sorrowing over the wretchedness of so many men, whom We saw to be wandering like sheep on steep and difficult places without a shepherd, [...] We determined to send from Italy tothat land many priests to console their countrymen in their own tongue, to teachthe faith and the obligations of the Christian life, which were unknown orneglected, to administer to them the saving sacraments, to spread among therising generation religion and charity - in fine to help all of every class, byword and work, and to assist them by all the duties of the priestly office.”

Also, in 1914, Pope Pius X, anxious to protect the faith of migrants against the traps of Protestants, socialists, and Masons, wanted to organize the structuring of pastoral assistance to Catholic emigrants. He envisages the creation of the Pontifical College for the Formation of Priests for the Emigration, which, due to the First World War, would take place in 1920 under the pontificate of his successor, Pope Benedict XV.

In 1915, Pope Benedict XV instituted World Migrant Day to spiritually and economically support the pastoral works serving to help Italian emigrants.