Pope Leo XIV in Canary Islands: “Dignity has no passport”

The encounter, held with Church, civil, and humanitarian groups involved in migrant reception, placed the drama of the Atlantic route at the center of the Pope’s visit to the Canary Islands. The archipelago, closer to the African coast than to mainland Spain, has become a major point of entry for people fleeing hunger, war, poverty and exploitation. Arguineguín, once described by locals and aid workers as the “port of shame” after the overcrowding crisis of 2020, was presented Thursday as a place where suffering can be turned into welcome.

Bishop José Mazuelos Pérez of the Canary Islands welcomed the Pope by recalling that migrants arriving by cayuco and patera often travel from Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia, Mali and Morocco, sometimes covering more than 1,600 kilometers (almost 1,000 miles) at sea. He called those who assist them — Salvamento Marítimo, police, Civil Guard, Red Cross, Caritas, parish workers and local fishermen — “guardian angels” of migrants.

The testimonies that followed gave flesh to those words. Tito Villarmea, captain with Salvamento Marítimo, said he and his team have rescued more than 20,000 people during his 18 years at sea. He remembered one rescue in which a mother, once safely aboard, removed a cap and jacket from a child thought to be a boy and put gold earrings on her: “It was a girl,” he recalled. As the father of two teenage daughters, he said, he wept.

A Caritas volunteer spoke of the first, limited gestures of welcome: biscuits, milk, a coat, a coffee, help with documents, and the effort to communicate when no common language is available. Another testimony, read on behalf of Blessing, a Nigerian woman and survivor of trafficking, told of hunger, coercion, debt, abuse and separation from her child before the help of Church social workers allowed her life to begin changing. María Fernanda López Meza, a Latin American entrepreneur who arrived in Las Palmas in 1997, offered a different face of migration: integration through work, gratitude and the chance to create employment for others.

In his address, Pope Leo began from Matthew 25 and said that, beside the sea, the Gospel becomes concrete. Those who arrive, he said, are “stripped of almost everything,” but not of the dignity he later crystallized in a forceful line: “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.” Pointing to the Fisherman’s Ring he wears, he linked Peter’s call to become a fisher of men with the literal and painful mission facing these islands, where people are rescued from the sea and bodies are recovered from the waters.

The Pope denounced the “monsters” that haunt the sea today: mafias that traffic in desperation, traffickers who enslave women and children, and the indifference that lets the poor be swallowed by exploitation or neglect. He also warned migrants against the false promises of traffickers, calling them “siren songs” and “industries of death.”

But his message was also directed to Europe, countries of origin and transit, and the whole international community. It is not enough, he said, to manage arrivals, count statistics, reinforce borders or mourn deaths after they occur. Human dignity, he insisted, requires legal and safe pathways, rescue and assistance, protection for victims of trafficking, serious reception and integration, and policies that allow people to remain in their own countries with dignity.

Before leaving the port, the Pope laid flowers in memory of those who died on migration routes by sea and blessed a cross made from the wood of a migrant boat near an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. His visit turned Arguineguín into a pulpit at the edge of the Atlantic, where the Church’s teaching on the stranger, the wounded and the poor was addressed as a question placed before Europe’s conscience.