Maltese cardinal: Scripture speaks to us amid migrant crisis

April 28, 2016

Noting that the phrase “invasion of barbarians” has been replaced by the “more politically correct ‘migration of peoples,’” a Maltese biblical scholar and cardinal reflected on the current migration crisis.

Out of the encounter between barbarian invaders and a declining but increasingly Christian Roman civilization, medieval culture was forged, Cardinal Prosper Grech, 90, said in an article published by L’Osservatore Romano.

Today, though, the mostly Muslim migrants are encountering a secularized and even anti-Christian European culture—one with a low birthrate. The situation “challenges us to make use of all the resources inherited from our humanistic and Christian tradition.”

Relevant Scripture passages, he said, “are able to read in a contemporary way,” including Jeremiah’s pleas for conversion in the face of the Babylonian invasion, and St. Paul’s list of pagan vices in the first chapter of his Letter to the Romans—vices which, the cardinal said, are now looked upon as “cultural breakthroughs.”

 

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Further information:

• Segno dei tempi (L’Osservatore Romano, p. 5)