Pope Francis has put up a Christian family in the Vatican as part of a broader Church effort to respond to Europe's refugee crisis. PHOTO: AFP
The Christian family is the first of two that the Catholic leader has promised to find space for as part of a broader Church effort to help shape Europe's response to an ongoing migration crisis partly caused by the conflict in Syria.
The family arrived in Italy on September 6, the day the pope called on every Catholic parish across Europe to find space for at least one family of refugees.
Read: Pope calls on every European parish to host one migrant family each
The family being housed in the Vatican is to remain anonymous until Italian authorities have ruled on their asylum request.
As Christians who have fled a Syria wracked by a deadly civil war and the persecution of minorities, they are highly likely to be quickly granted leave to remain in Italy.
The processing of their application could however take months, possibly years, unless they are made a special case.
In his call for the Church to take a lead on the migration issue, Francis urged local communities of believers to make a "concrete gesture" ahead of a Jubilee Year of Mercy starting in December.
He said "every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe," should take part.
"Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers fleeing death (as) victims of war and hunger who are hoping to start a new life, the gospel calls on us and asks us to be the neighbour of the smallest and the most abandoned, to give them concrete hope," he said in a Sunday address in St Peter's square.
The Argentinian pontiff has made the fate of society's weakest, including the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe, the dominant theme of his papacy.
His call for a grassroots response to the crisis has been widely praised and he acknowledged that initiatives across Europe had inspired him, comparing them to a biblical miracle in which which Jesus heals a deaf and mute man.
"We have been healed of the deafness of selfishness and the silence of retreating into ourselves," he said.
"The closed couple, the closed family, the closed group, the closed parish, the closed country, that comes from us, it has nothing to do with God."
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