Pope Francis visits refugee camp in Lesbos and brings a dozen Syrian Muslim migrants back to Rome with him

Pope Francis today rescued a dozen Syrian refugees from a camp in Lesbos and brought them back to Rome following a visit to the Greek island to highlight the humanitarian crisis.

Three families of Syrian refugees boarded the Pontiff’s aircraft shortly after 1pm at the end of his lightening visit to Lesbos.

A Vatican spokesman said: ‘The Pope has desired to make a gesture of welcome regarding refugees, accompanying on his plane to Rome three families of refugees from Syria, 12 people in all, including six children.’

While on Lesbos, Pope Francis blasted people smugglers and arms traffickers who he blamed for worsening the current refugee crisis in Europe.

Addressing a large group of asylum seekers in a reception camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, Pope Francis said migrants were not numbers but people with ‘faces, names and individual stories’ who were prayed upon by ‘unscrupulous thugs’.

The Pontiff was greeted at the camp by a large group of children, some of whom arrived in Greece without their parents.

Addressing the refugees, he said: ‘You are not alone.’

The teenage boys who have made the perilous journeys from their homelands to Greece alone were lined up at the entrance, shaking the hands of the pope and two other religious leaders. Some were holding a Syrian flag.

Many refugees fell to their knees and wept as Francis approached them. Others chanted ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as he passed by. Francis bent down as one young girl knelt at his feet sobbing uncontrollably. A woman told the pope that her husband was in Germany, but that she was stuck with her two sons in Lesbos.

‘Refugees are not numbers, they are people who have faces, names stories and need to be treated as such,’ Francis tweeted.

He urged the European Union to change its policy towards the migrants. He said: ‘We hope that the world will heed these scenes of tragic and indeed desperate need, and respond in a way worthy of our common humanity.’

The pope’s visit to the island, which has seen the majority of the arrivals of migrants heading into Europe, is highly symbolic. It comes shortly after the European Union began deporting new arrivals back to Turkey under a controversial deal meant to stem the refugee flow.

The pope then meet men and women who have fled their homelands seeking refuge in Europe. Some wept as they met the pope.

One man wept uncontrollably and wailed as he knelt down before Francis on Saturday and said: ‘Thank you, God. Thank you. Please Father, bless me.’

Children offered Francis drawings and the pope praised one little girl for her artwork, saying ‘Bravo. Bravo.’ Then as he handed it off to his staff he stressed: ‘Don’t fold it. I want it on my desk.’

As he walked by them, shaking hands with the men and bowing to the women, the refugees shouted out their homelands: ‘Afghanistan.’ ‘Syria.’

One little boy ducked his head through a fence to kiss Francis’ ring.

Pope Francis said: ‘This is a voyage marked by sadness, a sad voyage,’ the pope told reporters during the flight from Rome. We will witness the worst humanitarian disaster since the Second World War. We will see so many people who are suffering, who are fleeing and do not know where to go.

‘And we are also going to a cemetery, the sea. So many people never arrived.’

Greek Prime Minister Alex Tspiras greeted Pope Francis upon his arrival on Lesbos. During a brief formal meeting, he spoke about the efforts pade by the Greek people in dealing with the refugee crisis: ‘I am proud of this, particularly at a time when some of our partners – even in the name of Christian Europe – were erecting walls and fences to prevent defenceless people from seeking a better life. That is why I consider that your visit is historic and important.’

He said the pope’s visit ‘is a very important opportunity to show the need to stop the war, the taking advantage of people and to give the possibility of a legal route for these people who leave their homes and search for a better future in Europe’.

A group of about 200 people held a brief protest near the scene where Pope Francis, Patriarch Bartholomew I and Archbishop of Athens Ieronymos II held a prayer ceremony and tossed floral wreaths into the sea in memory of the refugees and migrants who died trying to reach Europe.

The protesters were chanting ‘No Borders, No Nation. Stop Deportation’.

Moments earlier, police detained a woman attempting to display a banner inside the enclosure of the crowd gathered to watch the ceremony. As she was being led away, the woman said she was a volunteer working in Lesbos on the refugee issue.

The Vatican official in charge of migrants, Cardinal Antonio Maria Veglio attacked the EU-Turkey plan, claiming it essentially treats migrants as merchandise that can be traded back and forth and doesn’t recognise their inherent dignity as human beings.

The visit is meant to highlight the plight of refugees, thank the Greek people who have welcomed them in, and to show a united Christian response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding.

Hours before Francis arrived, the European border patrol agency Frontex intercepted a dinghy carrying 41 Syrians and Iraqis off the coast of Lesbos. The refugees were detained and brought to shore in the main port of Mytilene.

Also ahead of the visit, municipal crews scrubbed the walls of the capital and port after graffiti reading ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ was sprayed in black at several points on the seafront in Mytilene. A handful of senior Orthodox clergy in Greece have been highly critical of Francis’ trip, though the protests are nothing compared to the protests that greeted St. John Paul II’s visit in 2001.

The wreath-tossing ceremony scheduled for later Saturday is a gesture Francis first made when he visited the Italian island of Lampedusa in the summer of 2013, his first trip outside Rome as pope, after a dozen migrants died trying to reach the southern tip of Europe. He made a similar gesture more recently at the U.S.-Mexican border, laying a bouquet of flowers next to a large crucifix at the Ciudad Juarez border crossing in memory of migrants who died trying to reach the U.S.

‘He is slightly provocative,’ said George Demacopoulos, chair of Orthodox Christian studies at the Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. Citing Francis’ Mexico border visit in February, in the heat of a U.S. presidential campaign where illegal immigration took center stage, he added: ‘He is within his purview to do so, but that was a provocative move.’

The Vatican insists Saturday’s visit is purely humanitarian and religious in nature, not political or a ‘direct’ criticism of the EU plan.

The Archbishop of Athens Ieronymos II spoke Saturday during a visit to a migrant detention center on the Greek island of Lesbos along with Pope Francis and the spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

‘Unfortunately it is not the first time we denounce the politics that have brought these people to this impasse,’ Ieronymos said. ‘We will act however, until the aberration and depreciation of the human person has stopped.’

Ieronymos was clear in his criticism of the European response to the refugee crisis, which has resulted in a deal with Turkey whereby new arrivals to Greek islands are sent back to Turkey.

‘Only those who see the eyes of those small children that we met at the refugee camps will be able to immediately recognize, in its entirety, the `bankruptcy’ of humanity and solidarity that Europe has shown these last few years to these, and not only these, people,’ he said.

He closed his speech by calling on the United Nations to address ‘this tragic situation that we are living.

But spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters that Francis’ position on Europe’s ‘moral obligation’ to welcome refugees is well-known, and that the EU-Turkey deportation deal certainly has ‘consequences on the situation of the people involved.’

The Vatican official in charge of migrants, Cardinal Antonio Maria Veglio, was even more explicit, saying the EU-Turkey plan essentially treats migrants as merchandise that can be traded back and forth and doesn’t recognize their inherent dignity as human beings.

The March 18 EU-Turkey deal stipulates that anyone arriving clandestinely on Greek islands on or after March 20 will be returned to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece. For every Syrian sent back, the EU will take another Syrian directly from Turkey for resettlement in Europe. In return, Turkey was granted concessions including billions of euros to deal with the more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees living there, and a speeding up of its stalled accession talks with the EU.

Human rights groups have denounced the deal as an abdication of Europe’s obligations to grant protection to asylum-seekers.

The son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis has made the plight of refugees, the poor and downtrodden the focus of his ministry as pope, denouncing the ‘globalization of indifference’ that the world shows the less fortunate.

Aside from the inherently political nature of the trip, it also has a significant religious dimension. Francis will be visiting alongside the spiritual leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and the head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Athens Archbishop Ieronymos II.

Lombardi said the ecumenical significance of such a meeting was ‘obvious’ – and he credited Greece’s politicians with their willingness to let the religious leaders take center stage as an ‘appreciated’ gesture of discretion.

England’s top Catholic cleric blasts David Cameron’s Syrian refugee programme branding it a ‘great disappointment’

The Syrian refugee resettlement programme set up by David Cameron is a ‘great disappointment’, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols said Britain’s response to the crisis was ‘going very slowly’ and called for a major increase in the number of people being taken in.

Asked if he believed governments needed to show more humanity, the archbishop of Westminster replied: ‘I do.’

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I think we have the resources as a very rich country. Think of a country like the Lebanon and some of the other Middle Eastern countries where they have a proportion of refugees present which represents 30-40 per cent of the population and they cope.

‘We are a very rich country and I think with a greater cohesiveness between a spirit of willingness that is there among many and mechanisms which governments can put into place, we could be doing more.’

He added: ‘There are aspects of the government policy that are commendable but I’ve said surely that can be speeded up. Surely in the first year we can see really how many could be taken and then multiply that by five.

‘At the moment it’s going very slowly and it’s a great disappointment.’