Pope Francis Calls on All of Europe’s Catholics to House Refugees
By ALISON SMALE/The New York Times/SEPT. 6, 2015
VIENNA — Pope Francis on Sunday called on every parish, religious community, monastery and sanctuary in Europe to shelter refugees fleeing “death from war and hunger,” adding that the Vatican’s two parishes would lead the way by taking in two families. In a speech to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, the pope said it was not enough to say “have courage, hang in there” to those marching toward what he described as “life’s hope.”Referring to the “tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees that flee death in conflict and hunger and are on a journey of hope,” Francis said, according to Vatican Radio, “the Gospel calls us to be close to the smallest and to those who have been abandoned.” He specifically asked that the European bishops support the effort.
It was Francis’ first direct message to Europe — and the world — about how to embrace and integrate the largest mass migration Europe has seen since the end of World War II. From Greece to Germany, thousands of refugees remained on the move, packing boats, buses and trains and heading north and west. Pope Francis spoke to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday. The sudden decision late Friday by Austria and Germany to throw open their borders and take in thousands of refugees unwanted in Hungary does not seem to have stilled the movement across a continent that is feeling the effects of the caldrons of conflict across the Middle East. In Cyprus, the authorities said on Sunday that they had rescued 114 people believed to be refugees fleeing Syria after their fishing boat issued a distress call some 46 miles off the island’s southern coast, The Associated Press reported.Thousands of migrants continued to arrive on Lesbos and other Greek islands from Turkey. Migrants continued from there to the port of Piraeus in Athens and started heading north along the Balkan land route taken by tens of thousands of others in recent weeks.
At the same time, construction crews rushed to complete work on a nearly 12-foot-high fence topped with razor wire spanning Hungary’s 108-mile border with Serbia, the port of entry for most refugees. The authorities at a border crossing near the town of Roszke rounded up hundreds of refugees Sunday and sent them to a newly opened “registration center,” which the local police were calling an “alien holding center,” Reuters reported. The authorities said the migrants would be held there no more than 24 hours, but human rights groups, as well as the migrants themselves, were worried they might be detained longer. At the other end of the migrant trail, Austrian rail operators announced that they had carried about 13,000 people to Germany from early Saturday to Sunday morning. Thousands of migrants and refugees are desperately pushing their way into Europe.
A team of New York Times journalists is documenting the journey. In the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf, hundreds of migrants spent a cold night in a vast hall equipped over the past week to receive them. Other migrants at the Vienna rail station waiting for a train to Germany were allowed to sleep on an empty train as temperatures dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, or 10 degrees Celsius, in some places. In Germany, which has taken in the most refugees and expects 800,000 asylum seekers this year, volunteers were again at the main Munich rail station and other locations across the country on Sunday, welcoming the new arrivals in a determined display of hospitality that counters right-wing resistance to the newcomers.
Chancellor Angela Merkel was to discuss the situation with her partners in her coalition government on Sunday evening. The Social Democrats back Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats in offering a determined welcome and insisting that Germany can afford to take in the expected arrivals. But some members of the Christian Social Union, the more conservative party in Ms. Merkel’s center-right bloc, have objected to throwing open the doors. Ms. Merkel and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary agreed in a telephone call on Saturday evening that both countries must continue to uphold their commitments to the European Union asylum law known as the Dublin Regulation, the chancellor’s office said. Both leaders agreed that the westward journey of the refugees on Saturday “due to the emergency situation on the Hungarian border was an exception,” the statement said.
Peter Altmaier, Ms. Merkel’s chief of staff, told a public broadcaster that the chancellor held talks throughout Saturday with German and European partners in an effort to get every European Union member to take in a share of refugees. “We have been facing this challenge for several months and we continue to take in refugees,” Mr. Altmaier said. “But we need a readiness in other European countries to join in.”“I am convinced that the situation will normalize itself when we are able to come to a European consensus, as we did in the crisis in Ukraine, in the crisis in Greece, that is supported by all countries in Europe,” Mr. Altmaier said. Austria faces a similar influx — 80,000 asylum applicants are expected this year in a country of eight million, about one-tenth the population of Germany. That prospect has bolstered far-right populists at the expense of the governing Social Democrats and conservatives, but Chancellor Werner Faymann insisted on Sunday that Austria would play its part in a European solution. A convoy of some 150 cars driven by Austrian volunteers headed toward Hungary on Sunday, with organizers saying they would pick up any refugees who wanted to go West. The police warned the drivers against exposing themselves to charges in Hungary that they were in effect smuggling people across borders.
The mass movement has produced a sharp spike in people smuggling, with the most tragic case occurring in Austria, where 71 people were found dead in an abandoned truck by the side of a highway southeast of Vienna on Aug. 27. Since then, officials have reported that almost 200 other people narrowly averted death in vehicles crammed with stowaways who pay hundreds or even thousands of euros for the promise of reaching Austria, Germany or other wealthy nations in Europe. Coincidentally, it was exactly 26 years ago on a first September Sunday that Hungary opened its border at Hegyeshalom to allow tens of thousands of East Germans to cross into Austria at Nickelsdorf and continue through Austria to what was then West Germany.
Hungary’s behavior in recent days — allowing and then barring refugees from trains into Austria, and building the fence on its southern border with Serbia to discourage migrants from entering — has come under criticism from its 27 partners in the European Union. Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, which now holds the rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, told German television on Sunday that Hungary and other former Communist nations in Central and Eastern Europe had gained not only rights but also shouldered responsibilities in joining the union.
It is important, Mr. Asselborn said, for the European Union to respond to an expected request from Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, to absorb 160,000 refugees under an agreed quota system. A German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, reported that under Mr. Juncker’s plan, Germany would take in about 31,000 people, followed by France with 24,000 and Spain with almost 15,000. “We must do this,” Mr. Asselborn said. “I think we are capable of that.” Sensitive to criticism of callousness in response to the wave of migrants, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain is prepared to accept up to 15,000 Syrian refugees, but only from camps in that region, including from Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey, officials told The Sunday Times of London.
The British do not want to add any further incentive, or “pull factor,” that will encourage more refugees to risk the passage to Europe, nor to favor those migrants who could afford to pay people smugglers over those who are in the regional camps. With euroskeptics inside and outside Mr. Cameron’s ruling Conservative Party critical of Brussels, Britain will continue to reject the idea of mandatory quotas to distribute migrants and asylum-seekers already in Europe.
Britain will also allocate some of the financial aid it usually sends abroad to house and integrate Syrian refugees for the first year in Britain and to increase aid to refugee camps in the region, the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, said on Sunday. He refused to confirm a specific figure for the refugees. Mr. Cameron announced last week that Britain will add another 100 million pounds to the 900 million pounds it already provides for humanitarian aid to displaced Syrians.
**Reporting was contributed by Palko Karasz in Hungary, Melissa Eddy in Berlin, Steven Erlanger in London and Gaia Pianigiani in Rome.
