Francis: a migrant pope with migrants
Sensitivity and care towards migrants, refugees, and victims of trafficking were among the main qualities that characterized the ministry and magisterium of Pope Francis, who returned to the Father’s house on April 21, 2025. This brief remembrance does not aim to present a comprehensive summary of this pontiff’s teachings on the issues of human mobility. This is a task that will have to be addressed in the coming years by carefully studying the countless interventions that Francis dedicated to people on the move: these are speeches, homilies, reflections, and prayers that have been collected, at least until December 2022, and made available by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development at https://migrants-refugees.va/it/risorse/raccolta/.
At the same time, we would like to present here five essential elements of Francis’s action and thinking on and with migrants. The first is that for this pontiff, the issue of migration is personal. During his visit to the White House in September 2015, he expressed a fundamental dimension of his own identity: “As the son of a family of immigrants, I am pleased to be a guest in this nation, which was largely built by similar families.” Francis is particularly sensitive to migration and its implications, partly because it is part of his personal and family experience and history. Second, attention and care for migrants is an integral part of his ministry and magisterium. This is demonstrated by his historic visit to Lampedusa a few months after his election, a visit that must be interpreted in the context of a broader vision: the priority of the peripheries and their inhabitants – the most vulnerable, the least, the excluded – for the action and thinking of an outgoing church. Francis has never ceased to defend and promote the dignity and life of those who are victims of the “culture of waste” (Evangelii gaudium, EG 53); at the same time, he has argued that we must read history and current reality starting from these margins populated by a wounded and fragile humanity, but at the same time rich in values and faith, a humanity from which we can and must learn (EG 198). Third, his ability to read and organically connect the arduous journey of migrants and refugees to the journey of the Church itself, a Church that must learn to walk together—synodally—also because it is essentially “a mystery rooted in the Trinity, but which has its historical concreteness in a pilgrim and evangelizing people, which always transcends any necessary institutional expression” (EG 111). For Francis, migrants are not only women and men who remind the Church of its migrant and pilgrim nature, they are the Church that is the mother of all (EG 210).
Fourth, the pastoral and theological significance of this theme has been expressed in various ways and most recently in the Message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2024, where he states: “God not only walks with his people, but also in his people, in the sense that he identifies with men and women journeying through history—especially with the least, the poor, the marginalized—as if prolonging the mystery of the Incarnation.” Fifth and last, it is precisely from these deep convictions that Francis has become a “migrant with migrants,” beginning with the aforementioned trip to Lampedusa in 2013, followed by other trips such as the one to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico in 2016; to Lesbos in Greece in 2016 and 2021; and numerous other encounters that he himself sought with refugees and migrants during his travels around the world and in Italy. In this way, he has humanized and made migrants, refugees, and victims of trafficking worthy of attention and pastoral, spiritual, and theological care, people often denigrated by the powerful of the earth and portrayed negatively by the media.
In keeping with the biblical teaching that he himself has repeatedly referred to in his speeches and with the tradition of the Church, Francis leaves the Church with the task—often arduous and controversial in our times—of valuing, deepening, and putting to good use the rich human, spiritual, and theological heritage on migration that he has experienced and taught during his pontificate.