LAMPEDUSA, ITALY (OSV News) – Pope Leo XIV traveled to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa July 4, laying a wreath at the graves of migrants who drowned trying to reach Europe and celebrating an open-air Mass in which he called on Catholics to be Good Samaritans offering compassion to those who suffer attempting make the perilous journey by sea.
“I have not come to give speeches, but to celebrate the Eucharist, the supreme sign of Christ’s presence among us. Jesus’ gesture of breaking bread to give himself gives meaning and strength to our daily acts of assistance and sharing,” Pope Leo told the crowd before offering Mass in a field overlooking Lampedusa’s main port.
“Yes, this is a place where gestures speak more than words,” he added. “But gestures, to be human, require a heart. This is why we have gathered here: to draw from Christ the love that only He can give us, so that the world of today and tomorrow may be more human, for everyone.”
Lampedusa has for years been one of the main gateways to Europe for migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Tunisia and Libya, a journey that has claimed thousands of lives.
In April, the Italian coast guard recovered 19 bodies and rescued 58 people after intercepting a distressed dinghy about 80 nautical miles south of Lampedusa, according to the Associated Press. Last August, a boat carrying nearly 100 migrants capsized in international waters near the island, killing at least 26 people.
During his homily, Pope Leo described the seas surrounding Lampedusa as “as dangerous as the one that led down from Jerusalem to Jericho” in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke.
“Here you have seen not just one, but thousands of human beings fallen into the hands of robbers who have taken everything from them, beat them brutally and walked away, leaving them half-dead,” he said. “The sea has claimed the lives of others … we feel their presence, which challenges us no less than that of those who have landed in need of attention and aid.”
The pope landed on the island, which sits closer to the coast of North Africa than to mainland Italy, just before 9 a.m. His first stop was a cemetery, where he laid a floral wreath on the tombs of migrants who died at sea. The pope then visited the “Porta d'Europa,” or “Gateway to Europe,” a monument on the island, where he walked hand in hand with migrant children on the windy summer day.
About 14,000 migrants arrived on Italy’s shores in the first six months of 2026, according to the UNHR. Nearly 60 percent of that number arrived in Lampedusa, which is only about 8 square miles in size.
While walking along the island’s rocky coastline, the wind blew the pope’s zucchetto off his head, which his personal secretary Msgr. Edgard Rimaycuna quickly retrieved.
From there, the pope traveled to the Favaloro Pier, where he blessed a plaque dedicating the pier to the late Pope Francis and greeted a group of migrants accompanied by the Red Cross before celebrating the Mass with about 4,000 people in attendance.
“I have come to thank you, brothers and sisters of Lampedusa, for the solidarity that so many of you have shown,” the pope told the crowd at the Mass. “The miracle of compassion … is an inner revolution that brings forth within us God’s ‘heart’ and broadens our thoughts, hearts and lives.”
Among those present at the papal Mass was 24-year-old Giuseppe Capizzi, who traveled eight hours on an overnight ferry with about 70 other people from his parish of St. Francis in Cancicatti, Sicily, to attend Mass with the pope.
“I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time, and I’m absolutely thrilled,” Capizzi told OSV News.
Father Mikolaj Dobosz from Warsaw, Poland, traveled even farther to be present at the Mass.
The Polish priest, who has devoted the past few years to welcoming Ukrainian refugee mothers and children at his parish, said that he felt this was an important moment to pray with the pope for migrants and for people who are suffering.
“We work in Poland a lot with migrants, not from Africa or (the) Middle East, but from Ukraine mainly. I work with kids from Ukraine, and I’m really happy to pray with the pope for the people who are suffering,” Father Dobosz said.
One of the few Americans in the crowd for the papal Mass on U.S. Independence Day was Father Daniel Groody, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development.
“Pope Leo, especially now on the Fourth of July, is signaling what true freedom is about. True freedom is about the capacity to love,” Father Groody told OSV News.
“I think he’s continuing the tradition of the Church that has always recognized that everybody is created in the image and likeness of God, and that he really wants to bring out the dignity that’s often diminished in today’s society.”
Pope Leo’s visit comes 13 years after Pope Francis visited Lampedusa in July 2013, drawing attention to the island by choosing it as the destination of his first trip outside Rome after his election as pope, as a gesture of solidarity with migrants smuggled from North Africa.
During his visit, Pope Francis celebrated Mass on an altar built from the wood of wrecked migrant boats and condemned what he called the “globalization of indifference” toward people risking their lives to reach Europe.
Migration has remained a concern for Pope Leo since his May 2025 election. In June, he met with migrants and local aid organizations in Spain’s Canary Islands, another major entry point for people crossing from Africa, where he called on governments to establish legal and safe pathways for migration, strengthen rescue and assistance efforts, while also speaking of the “right not to have to migrate,” or the right of people to remain in their homelands free of hunger, war, persecution and violence.
“It’s just a great expression that Pope Leo, at the beginning of his pontificate, really has decided to come here to Lampedusa, as Pope Francis did, to recognize the Church must always be on the margins,” Father Groody said.
“The Church must always be accompanying those who are struggling to live a more dignified life and to really highlight the importance of the connection between faith and justice that’s really integral to our faith.”
Salvatore Sortino, who directs the International Organization for Migration’s coordination office for the Mediterranean, said that even as overall crossing numbers have declined since Pope Francis’ visit, the proportion of migrants who die at sea or fall victim to accidents during the journey has risen.
On Lampedusa, the IOM works with Italian authorities and humanitarian partners throughout the reception and assistance process, identifying trafficking victims and other vulnerable migrants so they can be referred to appropriate authorities and transferred to suitable facilities on the Italian mainland.
“The importance of search-and-rescue operations remains a central element of protection in the Mediterranean,” Sortino told Vatican Radio. “But opening legal pathways is eventually the real answer.”
Pope Leo’s Lampedusa visit came a day after the pope delivered a virtual address to a gathering at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which awarded him its 2026 Liberty Medal for advancing religious liberty and freedom of conscience, in which he spoke passionately about the importance of the “right to life” from the moment of conception to natural death.
In his homily in Lampedusa, the Pope Leo said that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan “tells us that love is always rooted in freedom, and freedom lies in the decisions we make.”
He said that “before any intellectual consideration or ideological conviction, the encounter with those who lie before us, stripped of everything, calls us to be close to them.”
“There are also those who choose not to be a neighbor,” the pope commented, adding, “it is time to recognize and affirm that religious affiliation must never become a reason for discrimination, as if faith had boundaries rather than being a universal call to salvation.”
“There is no love of God without love of neighbor, and there is no neighbor if I do not draw near. To pause, to be moved, to bend down, to weep before another’s pain – as Jesus did – means entering into the dynamic of love, the very movement in which God has revealed himself,” Pope Leo said.
An image of Our Lady of Portosalvo, Italian for “Our Lady of Safe Harbor,” to whom Lampedusa’s historic Marian shrine is dedicated, stood near the altar throughout the Mass.
“St. Augustine liked to describe human life as a voyage across a stormy sea and one’s destiny as a safe and secure harbor,” Pope Leo said. “In God we all have a safe haven, and every Christian community is called to be a reflection of it on earth.”
(Courtney Mares is Vatican editor for OSV News.)
