Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Abidjan (Agenzia Fides)- The Catholic Church “mother and teacher” with special concern for people in difficulty, shares the path of those who leave Africa often risking their lives to emigrate to Europe in search of a better life. This was said today 9 May by Bishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, in his intervention in a Colloquium on Pastoral Care of Migration taking place in Abidjan, in Cote d'Ivoire promoted by CEREAO West Africa Regional French speaking Bishops' Conference.
Bishop Marchetto recalled that the phenomenon of migration presents "lights and shadows”. On the one hand the percentage of people in the world living on less than a dollar a day has dropped from 40 to 20 percent, on the other “one million people still live in extreme poverty and half the world's population survives on less than 2 dollars a day ”.
A situation which highlights “the growing inter-relation between globalisation, poverty and development in the world today, directly affecting the international migratory phenomena ”.
Faced with this picture Bishop Marchetto recalled the Instruction Erga migrantes caritas Christi published by the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerant Peoples in 2004 which offered guidelines to “ ecclesial propositions for good management of the migratory phenomenon in Africa”. “The Instruction - he said- highlights the necessity for a broad approach in which migrants feel their experience less painful, less dramatic, part of the creation of a world of more justice for everyone where development is understood not only in economic terms but in a new way which promotes and protects the centrality and sacredness of the human person”. The phenomenon of immigration in fact poses forcefully “the moral necessity to work for a new international economic order with a more equal distribution of the goods of the earth in the vision of the international community as a family of peoples”.
Bishop Marchetto recalled the continual efforts of the Holy See in international forums to promote the creation of an international community of greater justice and greater respect for the needs of all peoples. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 9/5/2007 righe 35 parole 405)
