Pope’s Refugee Airlift Was Last-Minute ‘Inspiration’

ROME—About a week before Pope Francis’ one-day trip to Lesbos, the Greek island that has borne the brunt of Europe’s refugee crisis, a Vatican official approached him with an idea to bring a group of migrants stranded in Greece back to Rome with him, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“It was an inspiration…that I immediately accepted,” recalled the pope during a news conference on the flight back from Lesbos on Saturday. While he was speaking, the three families of Syrian refugees, a dozen people altogether, sat in the front of the Alitalia chartered flight—the private area where the pope and his entourage travel during papal flights.

The move—in the face of a new European Union policy to deport any migrants arrivingillegally in Greece back to Turkey—was among the most provocative yet from a pope who has placed migrants’ rights at the center of his papacy. He has visited migrants during many international trips and celebrated Mass at the U.S.-Mexican border. He decried the call by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to build a wall along the Mexican border as “not Christian.”

The pope’s last-minute decision to bring migrants back with him from Lesbos set diplomats from Italy, Greece and the Vatican scrambling to find an appropriate group of refugees. In particular, they had to be among the 50,000 migrants now stranded in Greece following the March 20 migrant deal struck between the EU and Turkey. And they had to be particularly vulnerable.

The Vatican didn’t distinguish on the basis of religion, the pope said. All of the dozen refugees who came to Rome are Muslim. “I didn’t make a religious choice between Christians and Muslims,” the pope said. “These three families had their documents in order. There were, for example, two Christian families who didn’t. This is not a privilege. All 12 of them are children of God.”

The Vatican enlisted the help of Catholic charity Sant’Egidio, a group that is active in assisting refugees and migrants. The people chosen “couldn’t believe it,” said Daniela Pompei, the Sant’Egidio official who assisted the effort, in an interview with Italian television.

Upon the migrants’ arrival in Rome over the weekend, supporters brought the families red roses. Half of the dozen Syrians are children and all three of the families’ homes were bombed during the war in Syria that has sent waves of refugees seeking to reach Europe.