ROME (CNS): Some 180 migrants, most from Eritrea, arrived at Mondo Migliore, a Catholic-run centre near Rome late on August 28 after officials from the Italian Bishops’ Conference negotiated their release from the Italian coast guard ship, Ubaldo Diciotti. 
 
They had been on the vessel for 11 days.
 

BEIRUT (CNS): “We appeal to the international community to shoulder its responsibility and strive to put an end to the ongoing conflicts and wars and to ensure the dignified return of the Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrians, Iraqis and others to their country,” Bechara Cardinal Rai, patriarch of Antoich and head of the Maronite Church said, as Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim religious leaders, met with the president of Switzerland, Alain Berset.
 

ROME (CNS/Agencies): “The path to saving our very humanity from vulgarity and barbarism passes through a commitment to safeguarding life. Every life. Beginning with that which is most exposed, humiliated and trampled upon,” the Italian Bishops’ Conference said in a July 19 statement after a woman survivor and two bodies were recovered from the wreck of a migrant boat in the Mediterranean Sea.
 

ROME (CNS): Tweeting with hashtags that translate as “Closed ports” and “Open hearts,” Matteo Salvini, the interior minister of Italy, disputed claims that the Italian government was complicit in leaving a migrant to die in the Mediterranean Sea as she clung to a board from a destroyed fishing boat.
 
Salvini strongly supported Italy’s policy of having the Libyan coast guard patrol its own shores, pushing back refugee boats or taking the migrants and refugees back to camps in Libya.
 

SAN JUAN (CNS): “The children who are separated from their parents need to be reunited. That’s already begun and it’s certainly not finished and there may be complications, but it must be done and it’s urgent,” said Daniel Cardinal DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, the president of the United States (US) Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
 

VATICAN (CNS): A culture of peace “calls for unremitting efforts in favour of disarmament and the reduction of recourse to the use of armed force in the handling of international affairs,” Pope Francis said in his annual address to diplomats accredited to the Vatican on January 8. 
 

VATICAN (SE): “All indicators available to the international community suggest that global migration will continue into the future. For my part, I ask you to view it with confidence as an opportunity to build peace,” Pope Francis says in his Message for the 51st World Day of Peace, which is marked on 1 January 2108.
 

HONG KONG (SE): The knee-jerk reaction of the president of the United States of America (US), Donald Trump, to the attack in the streets of New York on October 31 to put in place what he termed extreme vetting on all migrants coming into the country appears to be a choice to demonise an unseen enemy rather than face the reality of what has happened.