Your...ah, Pontifications...are getting old.
How many migrants did you allow to move into Vatcan City last year? How many Church properties were handed over to the various States to use as migrant housing?
That is what I thought.
STF up already.
Your friend,
Joe
And today is MLK day, on other news I have plenty of coffee.
ReplyDeleteJames Old Guy
To be fair, Vatican City did take in 12 Syrian refugees from three different families in 2016. And I believe more came later, but they are being rotated through and I don't think there are more than 20 there at any given time, at least from what I can see on a quick google search.
ReplyDeleteNow, Vatican City isn't so much a city as it's a single-industry enclave within a much larger city. It has about 500-1000 residents (depending on which site you read), and isn't even a square mile in area (it's 109 acres vs. 640 acres) so it's the size of a very, very tiny and very, very crowded town. (Compare to Broad Ripple, for instance, a 10 square mile - 6,688 acre - "neighborhood" which has 35K residents. If we accept the 1000 figure for VC residents, Broad Ripple has half the density of Vatican City, and I consider Broad Ripple kind of crowded. Plus, remember that most of Vatican City is given over to churches and offices and other official buildings, with residence being sort of an afterthought.) To expect the Vatican to take in hundreds of refugees like the EC expects its member states to take in thousands or millions of refugees is an exercise in unreality. But you have to give the Pope some credit for walking the walk while talking the talk.
The problem is, the Vatican didn't take random refugees and it didn't take them without due diligence. The rest of Europe is inundated with refugees who simply walked across its borders, landed rickety boats on its beaches, or otherwise were admitted willy-nilly. It's easy to say, as the Pope has said, that countries should be welcoming these refugees. It's quite another to live in one of those countries and watch yourselves being overrun by aliens who don't speak your language, don't adhere to your religion, rape your women, riot in your streets, and frankly would like to turn your country into another branch of the Umma after barely missing the brass ring back in the 1400's.
So yeah, the Pope is living in pie in the sky land. But that's his job, after all.