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I applaud the Pope’s intervention in Europe’s refugee crisis on the Greek Island of Lesbos last week.
In a series of heartfelt words and typically impressive gestures, he helped re-humanise a situation that has long threatened to dehumanise everyone involved it in.
Alongside the Archbishop of Athens and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Pope Francis drew on the story of the Good Samaritan to tell refugees that they were not alone. Conscious of his powerlessness in the situation, he told them that they had come “simply to be with you and to hear your stories.” This is badly needed in this crisis – mere, sheer presence can make a difference. “The greatest gift we can offer one another is love: a merciful look, a readiness to listen and understand, a word of encouragement, a prayer.”
His intervention was interpreted, no doubt rightly, as a rebuke to those European powers that are determined to send refugees back and are paying Turkey in order to do so - an agreement which feels perilously close to trading souls. But if that is what it was, it asks more questions than it answers.
Undoubtedly the most generous and hospitable political gesture in this crisis over the last 12 months was Angela Merkel’s open door invitation in August last year. It was a moment of supreme political courage and – by common consent – hubris, managing to generate hostility within Germany and among all the nations on the long trek from the Mediterranean northwards. Its repercussions were felt not only in the New Year sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere, and the slow closing up of borders in Eastern Europe but, according to many, in the way it stimulated the people-smuggling business as much as any up-front government investment. The best I have heard it described is idealistic. The worst is unprintable.
So, this seems to be the rock and the hard place between which we are placed: idealistic hospitality on the one hand, and hard-headed, state-sponsored people-trafficking on the other; or more bluntly, between Christian ethics and political realism.
This is the point in the blog at which the clever writer says something like… “but actually there is a third option on the table…” or… “but actually these two options are not as diametrically opposed as all that and can, in fact, be reconciled, by…”. Well, I am sure that political realism can be tempered with Christian ethics, or that Christian ethics can be nudged into the hard-headed world of immigration and asylum policy (I tried to do the same thing myself a decade ago, arguing that, in effect, we needed to be a bit more sceptical about immigration and a bit more generous about asylum). But, in truth, those writers who are able to come to some moral and pragmatic political response here are cleverer than me, and if anyone does know of any such realistic ‘third way’ I’d be pleased to hear of it.
In the meantime, and in the absence of any political silver bullet, we might hope that the effect of the Pope’s words is felt in your brain and mine… for when we hear stories of terrorists swarming westwards and see pictures of angry brown-skinned men tearing down razor-wire fences, we might recall the little girl collapsed in tears at the Pope’s feet and remember that “migrants… are first of all persons who have faces, names and individual stories”. That will do only a little to solve this agonising crisis but it might stem the tide of compassion-fatigue, suspicion, fear, anger, and hatred that threatens to dehumanise us too.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos | @theosnick
Image by Freedom House from flickr.com available in the public domain
