Vatican City, 12 November, 2020 / 1:00 pm (ACI Africa).
Pope Francis has urged Catholics to care for people fleeing “the viruses of injustice, violence and war,” in a message marking the 40th anniversary of the Jesuit Refugee Service.
In a letter posted on the JRS website Nov. 12, the pope wrote that the coronavirus pandemic had shown that all human beings were “in the same boat.”
“Indeed, all too many people in today’s world are forced literally to cling to rafts and dinghies in an attempt to seek refuge from the viruses of injustice, violence and war,” the pope said in a message to JRS International Director Fr. Thomas H. Smolich, S.J.
Pope Francis recalled that the JRS was founded in November 1980 by Fr. Pedro Arrupe, Jesuit Superior General from 1965 to 1983. Arrupe was moved to act after witnessing the plight of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees fleeing by boat following the Vietnam War.
Arrupe wrote to more than 50 Jesuit provinces asking them to help to oversee a global humanitarian response to the crisis. The JRS was founded and began to work among the Vietnamese boat people in camps in Southeast Asia.