Christian conscience came up to the mark this weekend when the leader of the Catholic Church and his Orthodox counterpart spoke up the thousands of refugees stranded on Lesvos. Their welcome intervention follows a path on which many have travelled in recent months.
The tone of reporting on immigration shifted over the course of this weekend as the media took stock of Pope Francis’s visit to refugees on the Greek island of Lesvos. In the company of the heads of the Greek Orthodox Church, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics caused ripples of shock by declaring before media onlookers that before the thousands now penned into so-called ‘hotspots’ on the island became refugees they had also been people.