POPE MEETS MIGRANTS ON HIS BIRTHDAY

Sun 19 December 2021:

On Friday, a group of migrants from Cyprus refugee camps who are being resettled in Italy at Pope Francis’ expense assisted him in celebrating his 85th birthday.

“You saved us,” an African boy told the pope during a meeting in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace a day after the 12 arrived from Cyprus.

They wished him a happy birthday and presented him with a painting of migrants crossing the sea created by an Afghan refugee.

They are the first of 50 people from camps in Cyprus who the Pope has promised to help. They are from the Congo Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Somalia, and Syria. The rest will arrive in the coming months, and the Catholic Sant’ Egidio charity group will look after them and help them integrate into Italian society.

Doctors and information technology workers from their home countries were among the first group.

The pope will provide for 50 migrants to resettle in Italy as part of a deal between Italy, the Vatican and Cyprus to commemorate his trip earlier this month to the Mediterranean island.

Francis, who became the first Latin American pontiff in 2013, has made the protection of migrants and refugees a central theme of his pontificate.

Cyprus, the European Union’s closest member state to the Middle East, has struggled to cope with an influx of migrants and refugees in recent years.

Many asylum seekers cross the island’s “Green Line” to reach government-controlled areas in the south after first arriving in the island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot state to the north.

During his trip to Greece from December 2 to 6, the Pope stopped at a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos.

During a previous visit in 2016, he left Lesbos, which was then at the epicenter of Europe’s refugee crisis, with 12 Syrian refugees.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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