“The encounter with the migrant, as with every brother and sister in need, ‘is also an encounter with Christ,’” says Pope Francis in his message for the 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees presented on June 3, 2024. Emphasizing the Church's “itinerant nature” as “the People of God journeying through history on pilgrimage,” he describes it as “‘migrating,’ we could say, toward the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees will be celebrated on September 29. Instituted in 1914 by Pope Pius X, on the eve of the First World War, it was originally intended to help Italian migrants around the world.
The full text of the Pope's message for this year is here.
Migration and the Synodal experience
The Pontiff's message for the occasion takes as its starting point the synodal experience of October 2023 in Rome. The Synod on Synodality is intended as an apprenticeship in the “joint journey of the people of God,” and can therefore be compared to the experience of migration.
He draws on the biblical episode of the Exodus, during which the people of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years, fleeing the slavery of the Pharaohs of Egypt.
This “long journey from slavery to freedom prefiguring the Church’s journey toward her final encounter with the Lord” is comparable, the Pope asserts, to the experience lived by “the migrants of our time.”
“Like the people of Israel in the time of Moses, migrants often flee from oppression, abuse, insecurity, discrimination, and lack of opportunities for development,” he says.
God is with and within migrants
“God precedes and accompanies his people and all his children in every time and place,” the Pontiff adds. Therefore, “the encounter with the migrant, as with every brother and sister in need, ‘is also an encounter with Christ,’” he said.
Pope Francis says that many migrants “experience God as their traveling companion, guide, and anchor of salvation.”
“How many Bibles, copies of the Gospels, prayer books and rosaries accompany migrants on their journeys across deserts, rivers, seas and the borders of every continent!” he exclaims.
Quoting the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Pontiff affirms that the Bible “leaves no doubt” about the place of the migrant: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Every encounter with a migrant, he insists, is therefore an “occasion charged with salvation.”
Prayer for a heart open to migrants
The text concludes with a prayer dedicated especially to this day:
God, Almighty Father,
we are your pilgrim Church
journeying towards the Kingdom of heaven.
We live in our homeland,
but as if we were foreigners.
Every foreign place is our home,
yet every native land is foreign to us.
Though we live on earth,
our true citizenship is in heaven.
Do not let us become possessive
of the portion of the world
you have given us as a temporary home.
Help us to keep walking,
together with our migrant brothers and sisters,
toward the eternal dwelling you have prepared for us.
Open our eyes and our hearts
so that every encounter with those in need
becomes an encounter with Jesus, your Son and our Lord.
Amen.
