Pope speaks on immigrants: Our obligation is to the person

Even as World War II fades from living memory, its vocabulary retains the power to shock, to call us to reckoning. 

Phrases like blitzkrieg and The Blitz, lebensraum, gas chambers and total war all have a real, dreadful meaning but the phrases the holocaust and the final solution tell a chilling story of evil that humanity should ever forget.

Pope Francis, like Churchill, understood the power of vocabulary when on Saturday he described some of Europe’s holding centres used to house migrants as “concentration camps”.