Pope Leo XIV traveled to a once-notorious epicenter of the European migration debate on Thursday, challenging countries to uphold migrants’ rights while shaming those leaders, including Christians, who turn them away with indifference.
Leo issued an impassioned plea to recognize the dignity of migrants from the port of Arguineguín, in the Canary Islands. In 2020, the port was dubbed “dock of shame” because of the squalid conditions migrants were forced to live in for months during a spike in arrivals.
“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” Leo said, with rescue ships docked behind him and a simple wooden cross made from a shipwrecked migrant boat nearby.
Leo is spending the final two days of his weeklong trip to Spain in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago closer to Africa than the Iberian Peninsula and a key point of entry for migrants who make the perilous Atlantic crossing from West Africa.
He is fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit the islands to commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea.
