The Pope calls for protection and welcome for migrant and refugee minors: "Every child possesses infinite dignity"

The Pope calls for protection and welcome for migrant and refugee minors: "Every child possesses infinite dignity"

GRAFCAN5123. LA LAGUNA (TENERIFE), 12/06/2026.- El papa León XIV saluda a varios niños durante su visita este viernes al centro de primera acogida 'Las Raíces' de Tenerife. EFE/ Ramón De La Rocha

by INFOVATICANA | August 14, 2026


Pope Leo XIV has focused his message for the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees on migrant and refugee minors, which the Church will celebrate on September 27 under the theme “Even one of these little ones.” The Pontiff warns of the special vulnerability of children affected by war, poverty, violence, trafficking, exploitation, and forced displacement, and calls for action both in countries of origin, to combat the causes that force them to leave, and in transit and destination countries, where he urges the guarantee of their protection and welcome.

In the message, dated August 11 and published this Friday by the Holy See, Leo XIV insists that “every child, every human being, possesses infinite dignity” and urges Christian communities to integrate migrants and refugees “as full members of the ecclesial family.” The Pope also calls on civil institutions to promote family reunification and avoid traumatic separations, and maintains that the debate must shift from “the mere management of migratory flows” to the protection of human rights. Among the fundamental rights of minors, he explicitly mentions “life, education, and a standard of living that allows them to grow and develop fully.”

Below is the full message of Leo XIV:

Dear brothers and sisters:

Year after year, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees invites us to focus our attention on different aspects of the complex migratory phenomenon. In this 112th World Day, the theme “Even one of these little ones” calls us to pay attention to minors directly affected by the experience of migration and flight, to concern for them, and to the Lord’s promise that whoever “welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (Mk 9:37).

A Look at the Catholic Church in Mongolia

Scots orphans used in ‘military experiments’

HOLYROOD’S child abuse inquiry will hear claims that British military scientists conducted drug tests on orphans in Scottish mental hospitals.

Published: 00:20, Sun, December 21, 2014

By BEN BORLAND

NC

Lennox Castle Hospital is one of four Scottish institutions alleged to have been involved

The allegations centre on at least four institutions where thousands of children are said to have been experimented upon in conditions described as “like something out of Auschwitz”.

It is alleged that Porton Down, the top secret military facility in Wiltshire, was involved in trialling drugs for use in the Cold War on youngsters who were regarded as “feeble-minded”.

One survivor told this newspaper he has obtained written and video evidence that he will pass to the public inquiry into historical abuse of children in care when it begins next year.

The man, now in his 50s, has been advised by lawyers to conceal his identity for his own safety until his full submission can be lodged at the inquiry announced by Scottish Education Secretary Angela Constance.

However, he was willing to divulge some of his intended testimony about the treatment he and others suffered.

He said: “Six and seven year olds were tied to racks and given electric shocks.

"I was incarcerated with orderlies armed with rubber coshes.

"We were imprisoned, experimented upon, lobotomies, you name it, they did it.

“I was there, I saw it with my own eyes.

We were imprisoned, experimented upon, lobotomies, you name it, they did it
A survivor

"I was classed as a misfit, a mental oddity, made a ward of court.

"My mother was killed and I became an orphan, so they took it upon themselves to have me experimented upon.”

Lennox Castle Hospital, near Lennoxtown, East Dunbartonshire, is one of four Scottish institutions alleged to have been involved.

The witness believes there may have been as many as 3,500 children who were involved in the Porton Down testing programme over the years.

He said: “They were using orphans to experiment with drugs for the Cold War.

"The drug programme ran from 1948 to 1982.

"I believe this happened throughout the UK but I’m referring to Scotland.

“I have this evidence, on paper and on film, and I will hand it to the public inquiry.

"It was like something out of Auschwitz and people will be full of revulsion when they learn the state allowed this to happen.”

Lennox Castle Hospital, which closed in 2002 and is now the site of Celtic FC’s training ground, was home to children and adults with learning difficulties or conditions such as Down’s syndrome, as well as truants, unmarried mothers and wayward teenagers.

Some patients were sent there as children, often for the most trivial reasons, and ended up spending decades locked up.

Conditions improved after a series of damning reports and investigations, including a 1986 World in Action TV documentary which led to questions in the House of Commons.

Last night, Professor Ulf Schmidt of the University of Kent, Britain’s leading expert on human experimentation at Porton Down, said he had never heard of a drug trial programme involving orphans.

He added: “That is not to say these experiments didn’t happen, but I would be very cautious in dealing with these allegations.

"Some stories have appeared and reappeared over the past 50 years, including a similar one about drug testing and euthanasia involving elderly people that was eventually shown to be false.”

Six years ago hundreds of veterans who ‘volunteered’ to take part in tests at Porton Down were offered £3million in compensation.

They were exposed to nerve agents, such as sarin gas, and hallucinogens, such as LSD.

In the most infamous case, from 1953, Ronald Maddison took part in a trial of what he believed was a cold remedy, but died within an hour of having sarin dabbed on his arm.

Other Porton Down experiments included spraying bacteria over the south coast of England and dropping cancer-causing particles from planes.

And Gruinard Island in Wester Ross had to be sealed off for almost 50 years after it was contaminated with anthrax during the Second World War.

Porton Down is the home of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, an agency of the Ministry of Defence.

A spokeswoman said: “We are not aware of any tests involving children at Portown Down and have seen absolutely no evidence to back up these claims.”

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Idahoans to face Haiti judge today: Group's intentions questioned; pastor speaks up in defense

By Nate Poppino - Times-News writer Posted: Monday, February 1, 2010 2:00 am (0)

Renea Kelley wipes her eye while praying during a Magic Valley Baptist Association 5th Sunday Sing held at Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls. Members of Eastside and Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian are being held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after attempting to take children outside the country without proper papers. (Drew Godleski/ For the Times-News)

Members of two southern Idaho churches on Sunday bowed their heads in prayer for their friends and fellow believers, imprisoned in Haiti after trying to take a group of Haitian children outside the country.

Meanwhile, the jailed Americans prepared to face a Haitian judge today, while the orphanage that took in the 33 children reported some still had living parents.

The 10 U.S. Baptists, including people from Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls and Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian and residents of Texas and Kansas, were arrested by Haitian officials on Friday while trying to take the children across the border to the Dominican Republic without proper paperwork. The group said it simply was trying to rescue them from the earthquake-ravaged country, but Haitian Prime Minister Max Bellerive and other officials said they believe the Americans were part of an illegal adoption ring.

Detained members of Eastside’s congregation include Pastor Paul Thompson, 43, his son Silas Thompson, 19, and Steve McMullen, 56.

Associate Pastor John Martinez urged his congregation Sunday morning to focus their “minds’ attention and hearts’ affection on God,” because “God already knew what was going to happen. Nothing has surprised him or caught him off guard.”

“He is the one who can make a difference, and he will,” Martinez said.

Concerned for their missing pastor and peers, church members prayed over a variety of Bible passages such as Romans 8:35 — “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Later in the day, they found support from other Baptist churches in the Magic Valley during a previously scheduled evening fellowship session.

Three Eastside members and others from Twin Falls had stayed in the Dominican Republic and were not arrested, including Helen Requa’s husband John.

“He’s 80 years old” and still worked to get the new site ready for the children, she said.

Church members told the Times-News they were surprised by the weekend’s developments, but believe their missing members will be all right in the end.

“It was such a shock, because I thought things were going so well,” church member Audrey Kinch said.

“I’m just excited to see them have the chance to share God’s glory with people,” said member Blake Burton.

The nonprofit New Life Children’s Refuge was formed just last November, according to the Idaho Secretary of State’s records. The churches became involved because the founders of the proposed orphanage are members of Central Valley.

New Life’s plan, as posted online, involved gathering “100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages” of Haiti and then driving them to a leased hotel in the Dominican Republic until the actual orphanage was built.

Speaking to reporters Sunday afternoon, Central Valley Senior Pastor Clint Henry defended the Americans’ actions and said the church hopes the “false charges” are resolved during the group’s court appearance today.

“My concern is: How long is this going to take?” he said of the process the detained face in Haiti.

While the earthquake has brought a tide of support to Haiti, New Life’s plans had been in the works for months prior to the disaster. After the earthquake happened, the church responded to the need by sending a team, Henry said.

“The entire reason for going down at this time is to try to rescue children in their suffering,” he said.

Some believe otherwise, and since the arrests, Henry has had to field phone calls to the church with obscenities and false accusations, he said.

On top of the Haitian government’s belief that the Americans were illegally trafficking children, other aid groups in the country criticized New Life’s plan as foolhardy, especially with recent restrictions aimed at restoring Haitian families after the quake. Bellerive’s personal authorization is now required for the departure of any child, but the Baptists hadn’t been following news reports and didn’t think they needed Haitian permission to move the children.

The children, ages 2 months to 12 years old, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said they arrived “very hungry, very thirsty, some dehydrated.” The orphanage worked Sunday with the Haitian government, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and others to reunite them with their families.

“One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” Willeit said.

U.S. officials and members of Congress are reportedly working to sort out the situation. Mike Mathews, a staffer for U.S. Sen. Jim Risch and an Eastside member, said Risch, fellow Sen. Mike Crapo and Rep. Mike Simpson are all following the issue.

Complicating the matter is the religious nerve the New Life proposal touched in a country that has received much of its aid in ways that challenge its own rich religious traditions.

Many at Eastside expressed their hope Sunday that the imprisoned group would spread Christianity among the Haitians. And Thompson clearly viewed proselytizing as an important aspect of the trip, according to posts on a church-linked blog and Facebook in the days after the quake.

“My prayer: ‘The Haitians shall know that He is the Lord,’” he posted on Facebook on Jan. 21.

At least one Voodoo leader found the orphanage plan — to give each child “new life in Christ” while facilitating their adoptions by “loving Christian families” in the United States — deeply offensive.

“These types of people believe they need to save our souls and our bodies from ourselves,” said Max Beauvoir, head of Haiti’s Voodoo Priest’s Association, which represents thousands of priests and priestesses. “We need compassion, not proselytizing now, and we need aid — not just aid going to people of the Christian faith.”

Staff writer Ben Botkin contributed to this report.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Posted in News, Local on Monday, February 1, 2010 2:00 am Updated: 10:20 pm.

Source:http://www.magicvalley.com/news/article_56f3102e-ef8e-5b59-846f-971e13b1e4c0.html

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Update:

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Report: Detained Baptists may be tried in Florida

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Haitian officials and U.S. diplomats are now weighing sending 10 American Baptists, mostly Idaho residents, to the U.S. to be prosecuted, the Associated Press reports.

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The 10, including members of Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls and Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, were arrested while trying to take children out of Haiti without proper paperwork. The Americans have said they simply wanted to rescue orphans from the earthquake-ravaged country and take them to a planned orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
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Haiti's communications minister told the AP the group might have to be sent to the U.S. because his country's court system has been crippled by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

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Meanwhile, Jorge Puello, a lawyer in the Dominican Republic representing the group, says one is a diabetic who fainted and has been hospitalized. Puello also alleged the group has been treated poorly, kept in a small room at Haiti's judicial police headquarters without adequate medical care or food.

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For more on this story, watch Magicvalley.com and read Tuesday's edition of the Times-News.

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Posted in Local on Monday, February 1, 2010 10:35 am Updated: 10:40 am.

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Source:http://www.magicvalley.com/news/local/article_b0c66120-0f58-11df-afbd-001cc4c002e0.html

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Allegations of Sexual Abuse at Catholic Residential Institutions in the United States

This webpage provides a sample of Catholic residential institutions in the United States where sexual abuse of minors has been alleged or accused clerics have worked. Many aspects of the allegations in these cases will be familiar from the Ryan report on abuse in Irish institutions.

• In Washington State, the Christian Brothers of Ireland settled with two dozen alleged victims in a single residential school.

• In Wisconsin, the director of a school for the deaf admitted to sexually abusing at least 30 boys and may have molested 200 or more.

• In Vermont, church officials settled with 75 men and women alleging physical and sexual abuse of shocking brutality at an orphanage.

• In Kentucky, an order of nuns settled with 45 men and women alleging physical and sexual abuse at another orphanage.

The table currently provides information on 31 residential institutions where 112 priests, brothers, nuns, seminarians, and lay people have been accused of sexually abusing children. In addition, 6 persons who are accused of sexual abuse elsewhere also worked at an institution on our list. For a report on our residential institution project and two institutions in the Boston archdiocese, see A Search For Links Between U.S., Irish Church Abuse, by Deborah Becker, WBUR (8/12/09).

The large numbers of alleged victims, the horrific nature of the abuse, and the advantage taken of entirely vulnerable children in 24-hour care, all link these U.S. cases unmistakably with the Irish situation. Ireland’s system of Catholic residential institutions for children was centralized and state-financed, whereas in the United States, the situation was more diverse. Residential institutions for Native Americans in the Western United States were state-financed but staffed by men and women religious, whereas orphanages and homes for disabled children were run by dioceses and religious orders. Yet there were financial and operational connections between the state and the Catholic institutions.

Almost every diocese had its orphanages, residential schools for the handicapped, and minor seminaries. Both the Irish and American systems endured robustly into the 1980s and in several cases into the 1990s. The Catholic church still operates many U.S. orphanages to this day. In fact, the 2009 edition of the Official Catholic Directory lists 403 orphanages currently operated by the Catholic church in the United States, up from 279 in 1960.In both countries, inspection and supervision were lax to nonexistent, and in the resulting vacuum, children were tortured and raped. In the United States, brutal and depraved regimes often thrived in dioceses run by eminent bishops, and in Vermont, a future bishop is alleged to have abused an orphan at one of the worst institutions.

These institutions were often staffed and operated by international religious orders with shared policies and practices and a global population of priests, brothers, and nuns.It is an urgent question, whether institutional abuse in the United States was similar in scope and depravity to the abuse analyzed in the Ryan report. The sample presented below would suggest that it was. BishopAccountability.org has launched a project to assess the breadth and depth of institutional abuse in the Roman Catholic church in the United States. We urgently request that anyone with articles, documents, or other information contact us at staff@bishop-accountability.org. This database will be updated frequently as our research progresses. It was last updated on September 14, 2009.

The priests, brothers, nuns, and lay people listed in each institution have been accused of abuse there, unless it is noted that they have been accused of abuse elsewhere but not, to our knowledge, at the institution in question. For best printing of this table, click Properties in your Print dialogue box and select Landscape.

BishopAccountability.org is also at work on several projects that are related to our analysis of abuse in Catholic residential institutions in the United States:

We are preparing an enhanced web version of the Ryan report, hyperlinked to allow readers to navigate the report more easily and to access sources that complement the report. One Irish survivor has expressed the hope that the Ryan report will not just gather dust on a shelf. We aim to keep the Ryan report in plain view.

We are compiling a database of Irish priests who were subsequently sent to work in the United States and have been accused of abuse. Irish readers would put Rev. Brendan Smyth, O. Praem., at the top of the list, and American readers will be familiar with the cases of Rev. Oliver F.

O'Grady and Bishop Anthony J. O'Connell. There are many others. We are fortunate to be working on this project with Mr. Joe Rigert, author of An Irish Tragedy, the best account of abuse in the Irish and American churches and the links between them.

Then we will post a database of publicly accused Irish priests, using the same methods we have employed in our database of accused priests in the United States, which contains information on over 3,000 accused priests, brothers, and nuns. The database of Irish priests will depend on allegations published in the media and documented in publicly available court documents, and as such, it will present only part of the total picture. But it will be a start. We have much to learn about the Irish situation, and we are grateful to knowledgeable persons in Ireland who have already contacted us to offer their help.

We invite friends in Ireland to contact us at staff@bishop-accountability.org.

For more information on these projects, see U.S. Watchdog Preparing Report on Child Abuse, by Kevin Cullen, Irish Times, June 20, 2009.

Unable to reproduce table (colums, etc).

Please click on link at end of article to view it.

Note: This table does not state or imply that individuals facing allegations are guilty of a crime or liable for civil claims. The sources cited in the table document allegations. The U.S. legal system presumes that a person accused of or charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty. Similarly, individuals who may be defendants in civil actions are presumed not to be liable for such claims unless a plaintiff proves otherwise. Admissions of guilt or liability are not typically a part of civil or private settlements.

In the U.S. legal system, all accused persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty. This table is based solely on allegations reported publicly in the media or publicly filed in the courts. BishopAccountability.org, Inc. does not confirm the veracity of any actual allegation, and this table is not a representation of the legal case history of the individuals listed herein.

Please send suggestions for adding documents to staff@bishop-accountability.org.
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Source:http://www.bishop-accountability.org/institutions/
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