Saturday, July 4Saturday, July 4Pope Leo XIV marked the United States’ 250th Independence Day by kneeling in silent prayer at Lampedusa’s cemetery of the nameless, where thousands of migrants who perished in the Mediterranean are buried, and urged Europe and the US to adopt a humane and forward-looking migration policy.
The first American-born pontiff arrived on the Sicilian island shortly after dawn, greeted by Italian government officials, Sicily’s regional president and Lampedusa’s mayor. He laid white flowers at graves marked with crosses fashioned from the wood of sunken migrant boats, including that of six-month-old Youssef Ali Kanneh, who died in a 2020 shipwreck. At the “Porta d’Europa,” a monument to those who never reached Europe, Leo greeted a migrant family and a child who told him, “Ten years ago my story began here in Lampedusa. I was alone and had lost everything—especially my mother.”
Standing on the rocks above the sea, his cassock whipped by the wind, Leo then blessed a memorial plaque to his predecessor, Pope Francis, who made Lampedusa his first papal destination in 2013 and coined the phrase “globalisation of indifference.” The current pope used the same language to denounce “indifference to the common good, corruption in countries of origin, a global economic system that breeds poverty and exclusion, fear that fuels prejudice and contempt, and the criminal calculations of those who profit from others’ suffering.”
In a half-day visit that coincided with fireworks and parades across the US, Leo celebrated an open-air Mass for some 4,000 people on a sports field and called on Europe to treat migration “not as a crisis to be managed, but as a challenge to be met with a holistic strategy.” He urged immediate relief to be embedded in a long-term plan that “welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates migrants while working for development so that no one is forced to emigrate.”
The visit came weeks after the European Union adopted stricter measures that expand detention and create reception centres outside EU borders. Leo, who has repeatedly sparred with the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, framed the trip as a rebuke to rising intolerance on both sides of the Atlantic. “The world of today and tomorrow must be more humane, for everyone,” he said upon arrival.
Since 2014, at least 35,070 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project. Lampedusa, 145 kilometres from Tunisia, remains the first European landfall for many crossing in unseaworthy boats. Leo’s presence on the island underscored the moral and political stakes of a debate that has hardened on both continents.
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„Opfer getroffener und versäumter Entscheidungen – Papst gedenkt auf Lampedusa den toten Migranten Bei einem Besuch auf der italienischen Insel Lampedusa erinnert Papst Leo XIV. an das Leid von Bootsmigranten. Er kritisiert Gleichgültigkeit und „die Vorstellung, dass uns diese Probleme nichts angehen.
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