ROME (Reuters) – Pope Francis was moved when Reuters photographer Yara Nardi showed him a photo of a migrant child during his flight to a Church conference on Mediterranean affairs in Marseille, France.
Nardi, who was traveling with the Holy Father, showed the large photo to Francis as he greeted media correspondents during the flight from Rome on Friday.
“He was immediately excited as soon as I took it out of the envelope,” Nardi said, adding that there was silence among the plane’s passengers and that the Supreme Pontiff had commented: “They are held in Libyan detention camps and then thrown into the sea.” .
The photo – which Nardi took the previous week on the small Italian island of Lampedusa – is a close-up of the eyes of Prince, 18 months old, a boy who, accompanied by his mother Claudine Nsoe, had arrived from Cameroon along with thousands of others who arrived. in recent weeks by sea from North Africa.
“He shook my hand and kept the photo,” he said.
On Saturday in Marseille, Pope Francis condemned “belligerent nationalisms” and called for a pan-European response to migration to prevent the Mediterranean, where thousands of people have drowned, from becoming a “tomb of dignity.”
Nardi said that the day before traveling with Francisco he was putting his photographic archive in order, as he usually does before his assignments.
“I saw the photo I had taken in Lampedusa and suddenly I felt like I had to show it to the Pope,” he said. (Reporting by Giulio Piovaccari; Edited in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)
Source: Ambito
