Pope Francis called on Sunday for the international community to act "decisively and promptly" to prevent tragedies like the capsizing of a boat with 700 migrants on Saturday evening. The pontiff also said Christians cannot communicate Christ's resurrection if they are focused on vanity or selfishness.
Pope Francis on Sunday expressed his "deepest sorrow" over the capsizing of a boat off the coast of Libya carrying some 700 migrants and addressed an appeal to the international community "to act decisively and promptly to prevent such tragedies from occurring again."
Speaking during his weekly address following the Regina Coeli prayer on Sunday, the pontiff said that migrants are "men and women like us, our brothers who seek a better life."
Describing the migrants as "hungry, persecuted, injured, exploited, victims of wars; seeking a better life," Francis poignantly called on those in St. Peter's Square for the weekly event to pray for them and their families.
Francis was referring Sunday to a capsizing that occurred about 70 miles off the Libyan coast Saturday evening. The Italian Coast Guard is said to have launched some 17 ships to the area to search for survivors.
The capsizing is the latest in a series of tragedies for migrants and refugees traveling the Mediterranean to leave Libya or other countries in the area. Hundreds of thousands are said to have taken the route in past years.
Francis has highlighted the issue many times, calling on the international community to address the violence and economic problems causing the migration. The pontiff also traveled in 2013 to Lampedusa, the Sicilian island that is the hoped-for destination of many of the migrants.
Before reciting the Regina Coeli Sunday, Francis reflected on the day's Gospel reading, which finds the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples and eating fish with them.
The pontiff focused on the call of Christians to be witnesses of Christ's resurrection and defined a witness as one who sees, remembers, and recounts Jesus' resurrection.
"The content of the Christian witness is not a theory, not an ideology or a complex system of precepts and prohibitions or a moralism," said the pope. "But it is a message of salvation, a concrete event, in fact a person: It is Christ risen, living and only Savior of all."
Francis then said that Christian testimony "is all the more credible by how much it shines by an evangelical way of living -- joyful, courageous, gentle, peaceful, merciful."
"If instead the Christian takes from comforts, from vanity, from selfishness, if you become deaf and blind to the question of 'resurrection' of so many brothers, how will you communicate the living Jesus, how will you communicate its liberating power of Jesus alive and his infinite tenderness?" he asked.
Ending with a prayer to Mary, the pope asked that we can become "witnesses of the risen Lord, bringing to people we meet the paschal gifts of joy and peace."
