Vatican newspaper editorial: In the African migrant, Christ knocks at the door of Europe
March 02, 2023
The editor of the Vatican newspaper has called on Europeans to open their doors to Christ in the person of African migrants.
In a prominent front-page editorial in the March 1 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda cited Christ’s words in the Book of Revelation: “I stand at the door and knock” (3:20).
Monda compared Europe, suffering from a demographic winter, to a large and almost empty house that is falling into disrepair. Instead of allowing in migrants from a burgeoning Africa to help fill the rooms, the elderly owners of the house “dug a ditch all around and built a wall crowned with barbed wire. But they still didn’t feel safe. They bought dogs.”
The owners, Monda continued, heard a knock at the door at night, but didn’t understand what the knock was. In the morning, they found people dead at their doorstep.
Monda added, “The story ends here, on the Steccato di Cutro beach”—a reference to a recent shipwreck that led to the death of over 60 migrants.
“The Christian knows that God has entered history and is close to us, he is ‘in the midst’ of us,” the editor commented. “And in the poor, in the least, in the sick, in the migrant one can see and touch ‘the flesh of Christ,’ as Pope Francis says. Today Christ is there, on the other side of the threshold, and he says those words, contained in the book of Revelation, which he will repeat until the end of the world: ‘I stand at the door and I knock.’“
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