VATICAN CITY, Italy
Pope Francis on Sunday urged
the world to learn from history on the threat of nuclear war over Ukraine and
choose the path of peace.
Looking back to the Second
Vatican Council in the 1960s, "we cannot forget the danger of nuclear war
that threatened the world at that time", the pope said during a
canonisation mass in St Peter's Square.
"Why not learn from
history? Even at that time there were conflicts and huge tensions, but the way
of peace was chosen," the 85-year-old said.
US President Joe Biden said
Thursday the world is facing nuclear "Armageddon", warning that
Russian President Vladimir Putin may use his atomic arsenal as Russian troops
struggle against a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The Vatican said around 50,000
faithful attended the mass on Sunday celebrating the elevation to sainthood of
religious figures Giovanni Battista Scalabrini and Artemide Zatti.
The pope used the opportunity
to offer prayers for the victims of what he called a "mad act of
violence" in Thailand.
A sacked police officer killed
36 people, 24 of them children, on Thursday in a gun and knife rampage at a
nursery.
And in recalling the work of
Scalabrini, a 19th-century Italian bishop who founded a community that serves
migrants and refugees, Pope Francis returned to a recurring theme of his
papacy.
"The exclusion of
migrants is scandalous! Indeed, the exclusion of migrants is criminal, it makes
them die in front of us," the pontiff said.
"And so today, we have
the Mediterranean which is the largest cemetery in the world. The exclusion of
migrants is disgusting, it is sinful, it is criminal."
He said that rather than
opening the doors to migrants, "we exclude them, we send them away, to the
concentration camps where they are exploited and sold as slaves".
Tens of thousands of migrants
try to cross the Mediterranean each year in an attempt to reach Europe, but
almost 25,000 have either drowned or gone missing since 2014, according to the
UN's International Organisation for Migration.
Zatti was an Italian-born
emigrant to Argentina who devoted his life to caring for the sick. - AFP
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