Vatican City, Jan 14 (AFP) Pope Francis called today forhospitality towards migrants, calling it a "sin" to give in tofear of the other as he marked the World Day of Migrants andRefugees.
"It is not easy... to put oneself in the shoes of peopleso different from us," the pontiff said during a solemn massat St Peter's Basilica.
"Local communities are sometimes afraid that the newlyarrived will disturb the established order, will 'steal'something they have long laboured to build up," Francis said.
While such fears are not a sin, said the spiritual leaderof the world's 1.3 billion Roman Catholics, "the sin is torefuse to encounter the other, the different, the neighbour.""The sin is to allow these fears to determine ourresponses, to limit our choices, to compromise respect andgenerosity, to feed hostility and rejection," Francis said,adding: "We often refuse to encounter the other and raisebarriers to defend ourselves."The 81-year-old pontiff, himself the son of immigrants toItaly from Argentina, has championed the cause of migrants andasylum seekers since his election in 2013.
His first official trip outside Rome was to the tinyItalian island of Lampedusa, which was at the time the firstpoint of arrival in Europe for thousands of migrants.
In April 2016, Francis visited the Greek island ofLesbos, a main entry point to Greece for migrants travellingfrom the Turkish coast, and returned home with three familiesof Syrian refugees aboard the papal plane.
"Every stranger who knocks at our door is an opportunityfor an encounter with Jesus Christ, who identifies with thewelcomed and rejected strangers of every age," Francis saidtoday.
Tomorrow Francis will begin an eight-day tour of hisnative South America, visiting Peru and Chile. (AFP)KIS.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.