Cain, where is your brother?
The answer, in the Bible, is that Cain had killed his brother Abel out in the field. God is asking because Abel’s spilled blood has “cried out” to him from the sullied ground. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asks, indifferently. The Bible’s first model of brotherhood has been shattered; the first human has died.
Today, the answer might be the Aegean Sea. There, seven months ago, a three-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body were shared rapidly around the world, producing a surge in attention to, and concern about, the refugee crisis wrought by the Syrian Civil War.
And there, seven months later, the European Union has launched a controversial program to detain migrants arriving in Greece and deport those who don’t qualify for asylum back to Turkey and their countries of origin. Hundreds of children have drowned in the Aegean since Alan Kurdi’s death, but attention and concern long ago receded. More than a million migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe over the past year, and European leaders and publics—stung by terrorist attacks and incidents of crime involving migrants, along with the broader challenges of integrating newcomers—have recoiled. Stalled efforts to relocate refugees in Europe have left roughly 50,000 asylum-seekers stranded in Greece.
Into that void steps Pope Francis, who this weekend is visiting the Greek island of Lesbos—from which several Turkey-bound ferries full of migrants have departed in recent days—in an effort to rekindle attention and concern. The visit will pose a “moral challenge for Europe,” according to The Washington Post. But what kind of morality does the pope have in mind?