Think about this for a minute — no, think about it for a lot longer than that.
While we were going through our annual Christmas excesses, spending money like it’s going out of style, people in the Middle East, especially Syria, were dying. Lots of them; especially children.
While we were engaging in the political buffoonery we experience every four years — watching candidates spend billions of dollars to say really absurd things and then deny saying them — people continued to die in great numbers. Especially children.
According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, by the end of 2015, the last year official figures were available, the world had 65.3 million refugees. That represents one of every 113 people on the face of the earth. And it represents a 5.8 million person increase over the previous year. It’s a problem worth more than a passing thought.
Consider this: The world has more refugees right this very minute than it had following World War II.
Some of them were being treated humanely, absorbed into various European societies; some came to the United States. Many, perhaps even most, were simply ignored.
Others, including many in the United States, are being vilified as the reasons for various societal problems, vilified by politicians looking to explain complicated societal problems with simplistic, uninformed answers.
Think about what is still happening in Syria, where 60 percent of the entire population has been displaced from their homes. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is continuing to bomb the population on behalf of Syria’s dictator.
When considering the refugee crisis, the numbers are too overwhelming to deny. According to United Nations figures, half of the world’s refugees are children.
The heartening news is that some people are trying to help them.
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is doing all it can, with the help of Catholics everywhere. Last year, CRS’ out-going executive director, Dr. Carolyn Woo, said that 1.25 million Syrian refugees received help from the agency. CRS is the overseas outreach agency of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
That help CRS provided included farming goods, training and seeds for those with agrarian backgrounds. And nearly 1.5 million children under the age of five received anti-malarial medicine.
But that is just a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Last World Refugee Day, Father Thomas Smolich of International Jesuit Refugee Services, noted that Pope Francis has called for “concrete actions” on behalf of the world’s refugees. Those actions, the pontiff said, should “tell the world that it is feasible to offer real help to refugees.”
“There are so many things to do,” Father Smolich said. They include providing meals, doing advocacy work, becoming part of a long-term, coordinated effort to help the world’s refugee problem.
“Or you can just help out when time and resources allow,” he said. “People are doing this despite what some political leaders are saying about refugees. We must inspire more people to help rather than allow them to be paralyzed by fear.”
Regardless of political interference and rhetoric, the Catholic Church, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Francis have made plain their willingness to help remedy the crisis.
“Refugees,” Pope Francis said, “are often perceived by society as an added cost or a problem, but they are a gift and a reflection of the face of God.”
Those who escape oppression, war, pollution or “the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources are a brother and sister with whom to share bread, home and life,” the pope said in a recent Catholic News Service story.
The pope also added that helping to solve the refugee crisis can lead us to “rediscover our common humanity.” The pope has asked all of us to “be witnesses of the beauty of encounter” with refugees. And may that encounter, he said, “help our society listen to the voice of refugees.”
GLENN RUTHERFORD
Record Editor Emeritus