Migrants in spotlight for pope’s eastern Mediterranean trip

Since becoming the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has sought to hammer home his philosophy on migrants: ‘Welcome, protect, promote, and integrate’. In returning to the Greek island of Lesbos this week, Francis hopes to refocus the world’s attention on an unresolved migrant crisis, which has become one of his highest priorities. The pontiff used his weekly Angelus prayer on Sunday to express his pain over the recent drowning of 27 migrants in the English Channel and those blocked in desperate conditions at the border between Belarus and Poland. In a video message a day earlier, he said the Mediterranean had become a ‘huge cemetery’ for migrants, deploring that refugees in Europe receive not ‘hospitality but hostility and even exploitation’.