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”.

Speaking in Rome’s basilica where he met a group of migrants and refugees from holding centres the pope encouraged European governments to move migrants and refugees from holding centres and into a more normal environment.

That he chose the eve of French elections, where Marine Le Pen has promised to end all immigration into France, may have been coincidental but his greater message prevails.

He encouraged the people in northern Italy, home to an anti-immigrant party, to take more migrants, hoping that the generosity of southern Italy could “infect the north a bit”.

There are many reasons to be concerned about uncontrolled mass immigration but if we have the confidence to insist that our obligations are to individuals and not to their ideologies, then maybe assimilation might be easier, because without assimilation this crisis will never be resolved. Nevertheless, we must do much more than we are doing now.