Two senior Catholic leaders offered apparently conflicting views on the migration crisis this week.

A day after European Parliament elections and with migration a major issue, Pope Francis issued a message urging society to drop scepticism and prejudice towards newcomers, calling these attitudes racist.

Meanwhile, cardinal Robert Sarah, a leading conservative Catholic voice said defending migration was a misinterpretation of Gospels by priests and bishops “bewitched” by political and social issues.

The Cardinal gave an interview to the French magazine ‘Valeurs Actuelles’, which appeared last weekend, at the same time as Pope Francis spoke up for migrants during his visit to Morocco by saying that politicians who build walls to keep them out would become prisoners of those barriers.

In the magazine interview, Cardinal Sarah said: “It is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence.”

“It is a false exegesis to use the word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these heartbreaks,” he said.

The Guinean cardinal, one of the most conservative voices in the Vatican, said priests, bishops and even cardinals were today afraid to proclaim divine teaching.

“They are afraid of being frowned upon, of being seen as reactionaries. So they say fuzzy, vague and imprecise on things to escape criticism, and they marry the stupid evolution of the world,” he said.

Migrants arriving in Europe were parked somewhere without work or dignity, he added. “Is that what the Church wants?” he asked.

The Church should not support “this new form of slavery” because the West, with its low birth rate, risked disappearing, he said.

“If Europe disappears, and with it the priceless values of the Old Continent, Islam will invade the world and we will completely change culture, anthropology and moral vision,” Cardinal Sarah said.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis offer a completely different view.

In his May 27 message for the World Day for Migrants and Refugees, he said the migration issue was not just about migrants and refugees, but “it is also about our fears.”

“The signs of meanness we see around us heighten our fear of ‘the other,’ the unknown, the marginalized, the foreigner,” he said, noting that many migrants seeking a better future end up as the recipients of this meanness,” he said.

“While some fear is normal and even legitimate, the problem is not that we have doubts and fears. The problem is when they condition our way of thinking and acting to the point of making us intolerant, closed and perhaps even – without realizing it – racist,” Pope Francis said.

“In this way, fear deprives us of the desire and the ability to encounter the other, the person different from myself; it deprives me of an opportunity to encounter the Lord.”

Tiled “It is not just about migrants,” the pope’s message came ahead of the September 29 World Day for Migrants and Refugees, which has been celebrated by the Catholic Church since 1914.

The message came after Europeans voted for the 751 members of the EU Parliament that saw an increase in populist and liberal parties.

Laurie Nowell 

AMES Australia Senior Journalist