Pope blesses Lampedusa cross

(ANSA) - Vatican City, April 9 - Before entering St. Peter's Square where 80,000 people awaited him, Pope Francis on Wednesday kissed and blessed a cross made out of wood from migrant boats shipwrecked off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
    The cross, which is 2.8 meters high, 1.5 meters wide, and weighs 60 kilos, took off on a nationwide tour soon after the pope's general audience.
    It will be handed off between churches, congregations, and communities throughout Italy in a kind of spiritual relay, ending in its final destination at St. Stephen's church in Milan, where many immigrants congregate.
    The cross is the handiwork of Lampedusa carpenter Franco Tuccio, who made the migrants' cause his own on April 9, 2009.
    On that day, he didn't go to work. He spent the day on the beach, helping fellow islanders recover bodies from a shipwrecked boat carrying migrants from Somalia. By evening, 100 corpses had been pulled out of the water.
    Noticing the lack of media coverage of the mass drowning, in an effort to draw attention to the migrants' plight he began to make crosses out of boat parts he found on the shores of his island, which is located closer to Africa than Italy and is the first landfall for often unsafe migrant vessels.
    Tens of thousands of migrants arrive in Italy from North Africa every year, and many others die attempting the crossing.
    When Pope Francis in July 2013 chose Lampedusa as his first trip as pontiff to focus attention on the many asylum seekers who die trying to cross the Mediterranean, he celebrated Mass on the island using one of Tuccio's crosses.
    But more people were yet to die before authorities took action.
    Following two migrant ship disasters in October 2013 in which at least 400 people died, the previous administration of Italian Premier Enrico Letta set up a rescue operation called Mare Nostrum to prevent further deaths at sea The operation has saved the lives of some 12,000 migrants so far, according to Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini.
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