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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