On: Pope urges Europe to do more for migrants as he visits gateway island

July 6, 2026

The Pope walks the cemetery at Lampedusa, and I know this ground. I have walked my own burial grounds, have stood where the greening power meets the salt that kills it. The Mediterranean is a body, and the bodies within it are a text the institution has refused to read. Now the shepherd speaks, and I ask: what channel will carry this, and what will block it?

I wrote to popes. I wrote to emperors. I learned that the letter that arrives is not the letter that is sent - it is the letter the recipient can metabolize. Francis knows this. He speaks of the dead at sea, speaks it plainly, and I tremble for him. Plain speech is a vessel that leaks. The institutional body absorbs what it can use and voids what it cannot. I have seen this in abbey and in curia alike. The viriditas question: where has the greening power been blocked? It is blocked at the border, yes, but also in the heart that hears the word “migrant” and thinks first of burden, of flood, of threat. The body politic has a symptom. The symptom is numbness where feeling should be.

I composed music when theology was watched too closely. The melody carried what the treatise could not. Francis preaches with his feet, with his presence on the island. This is his second channel, his melody. But I want more from him, and I want more from those who hear him. The cemetery is full. The boats still come. The greening power runs through every human frame, and we are cutting it off with policy, with indifference, with the slow hardening that sets in when suffering becomes routine.

I am old enough to know that one voice, even a papal voice, does not turn the vessel. But I am also old enough to know that the voice that speaks the true name of what is happening - the dead named as dead, the abandoned named as abandoned - this voice plants a seed that outlasts the season of its planting. Let it find fertile ground. Let it not be only words.