Where “public opinion and political expediency” have led to harsher treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, people still have an obligation to make special efforts to assist child refugees, said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to U.N. agencies in Geneva. Archbishop Tomasi focused on the mistreatment of asylum seekers, especially unaccompanied minors, during an address on Oct. 4 before the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2008, he said, 11,292 asylum applications were lodged by unaccompanied minors in 22 European Union states. With the violence across North Africa and the Arab world this year, he said, “Hundreds of unauthorized lone boys from the Middle East…are making their way across Europe,” facing possible exploitation and requiring special attentiveness from immigration authorities.
Child Refugees at Risk
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In this episode of Inside the Vatican, Colleen Dulle and Gerard O’Connell discuss the 2025 Jubilee Year, beginning on Christmas Eve 2024 and ending in January 2026.
Pope Francis prayed that the Jubilee Year may become “a season of hope” and reconciliation in a world at war and suffering humanitarian crises as he opened the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve.
‘If God can visit us, even when our hearts seem like a lowly manger, we can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!’
Inspired by his friend and mentor Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, leader of Ukrainian Catholics in the U.S., invites listeners in his Christmas Eve homily to approach the manger with renewed awe and openness.