In a new interview with Spanish radio station COPE, Pope Francis has spoken about a wide range of topics including his own health, the Traditional Latin Mass and mass migration.
On the subject of mass migration, Francis echoes comments made in Frattelli Tutti where he spoke of his understanding of the anxiety caused to Europeans by large numbers of immigrants and also to the damage caused to their home nations by their absence.
Those who emigrate “experience separation from their place of origin, and often a cultural and religious uprooting as well. Fragmentation is also felt by the communities they leave behind, which lose their most vigorous and enterprising elements, and by families, especially when one or both of the parents migrates, leaving the children in the country of origin”. For this reason, “there is also a need to reaffirm the right not to emigrate, that is, to remain in one’s homeland”.
Then too, “in some host countries, migration causes fear and alarm.
I realize that some people are hesitant and fearful with regard to migrants. I consider this part of our natural instinct of self-defence.
Pope Francis spoke of the 2016 terror attacks in Brussels and of how the deaths of thirty two people on that day are a potential warning for what could happen if ‘non integrated, ghettoized immigrants’ are ‘let loose’.
"if you welcome them and leave them loose at home and do not integrate them, they are a danger, because they feel strange. Think of the tragedy of Zaventem. Those who did this act of terrorism were Belgians, they were the children of non-integrated, ghettoized immigrants. I have to get the migrant to integrate and for this this step of not only welcoming them, but protecting and promoting them, educating them, and so on."
He continued with a warning about how many migrants can be accepted by individual countries:
"Countries have to be very honest with themselves and see how many they can accept and up to what number, and there is important dialogue between nations. Today, the migration problem is not solved by a single country and it is important to dialogue, and see 'I can get here...', 'it gives me the leather', or not; 'so far the integration structures are worth, they are not worth', and so on.
Francis finished by associating migration with the ‘demographic winter’ currently being experienced by Italy and other pro abortion countries with ageing populations:
And then there is also a reality before migrants, I already referred to it, but I repeat it: the reality of the demographic winter. Italy has almost empty villages."
A reality, that of the demographic winter, in which the arrival of immigrants can be of help "to the extent that our integration steps are fulfilled".