Reporter's Notebook: Pope Francis' Emotional Meeting With Refugees in Lesbos
— -- Today, Pope Francis, the "Servant of the Servants of God," visited the godforsaken refugees stranded on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Like few other places, Lesbos has been the front line of this humanitarian crisis.
The population here is about 85,000 people. In 2015, more than half-a-million refugees and migrants came ashore. Hundreds -- maybe thousands -- died trying.
They're still coming. Not in last year's biblical numbers -- but they're still coming.
Boats overloaded with men, women and children desperate for a new life still drift almost every day across the cold straits between this far edge of Europe and the refugee camps of Turkey.
And they're still dying. Just this week, a Turkish fisherman pulled up his nets in those cold waters -- and discovered a dead child tangled in them.
About 4,000 refugees and migrants are housed in detention camps on Lesbos now. Under the new deal brokered between the European Union and Turkey -- they can't go on.
No more boats and trains packed with people heading north. No more roads and railroad tracks lined for miles with families trudging towards a new life.
The authorities have taken hold.
Now, every person arriving here illegally is held until they apply for -- and are granted -- asylum.
In the meantime -- the camps are home.
The big one --Moria, where the pope visited -- was a prison. It bristles with barbed wire and armed guards. Built for 1,500 people, it houses about 3,000 now.
One family who was transferred from Moria to the more open camp of Kara Tepe described terrible conditions inside the old prison. Filthy, uncleaned toilets. Hour-long lines and more for wretched food. Minimal health care -- even though many arrive here with injuries or conditions requiring urgent attention.
Many non-governmental organizations say the conditions amount to violations of Greece's responsibilities under international humanitarian law.
Pope Francis cannot do very much in a practical sense to change all this.
What he can do is wield the power of symbolic action to bend the debate toward the demands of justice and of love.
So we had the extraordinary sight of the pope himself bringing with him back to Rome -- on his own plane -- three Syrian refugee families to live in the Vatican. It was in part a challenge to other world leaders: Do this.
It confirmed this pope's constantly surprising, deeply disruptive brand of global celebrity: Francis is to many almost a pope gone rogue.
But at heart, it seems, his aim is simply to be with these people, with the unwanted, the desperate, those with no place to turn. He wants to try to remind the world that government leaders, religious leaders, and we, too, must be here in the camps with them, in some form or fashion -- or we damage and degrade our own humanity.
Embarked on what many might see as a pointless or hopeless mission, it is striking to see how happy Francis is among the refugees. He loves this work. You get the unmistakable sense from him that here -- amid the filth and fear and the forlorn and the unwanted -- is where he belongs.
