Editor
Oct 3, 2025
Following her audience with Pope Leo XIV, Amy Pope, Director General of the International Organization for Migration, spoke with the Holy See media about the moral authority of the Catholic Church and its concrete actions to advance the rights of migrants.
Devin Watkins – Vatican City
Pope Leo XIV met with Amy Pope, Director General of the International Organization for Migration, in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace on Thursday, October 2. Following the meeting, Pope gave an interview to Vatican media, discussing her conversation with the Pope and her organization's mission to support the rights of displaced persons.
How did your meeting with the Holy Father go? What questions regarding global migration did you present to the Pope?
We began by discussing the impact of budget cuts in humanitarian aid on the work we and other organizations do around the world. We are currently seeing that the needs are immense and continue to grow due to conflict, the consequences of climate disasters, and worsening poverty. The number of displaced people has never been higher.
But at the same time, unfortunately, many of our major donor governments have reduced their support for humanitarian action. For our organization, this has impacted approximately nine million people who have lost their aid or seen it reduced. From a human perspective, the consequences are therefore catastrophic in some cases.
We therefore discussed the need for the Church to collaborate with organizations like ours, which address people's most basic needs, in order to advocate together for continued public awareness and support. We also discussed the importance of reframing the issue of migration at a time when polarization is reaching unprecedented levels.
The Church's message that migrants are a source of hope and the embodiment of the Christian journey still resonates powerfully. It is a pilgrimage we all undertake, spiritually or physically, and our task is to find ways to understand these stories, to build a community of support and awareness regarding the experiences of migrants, and to be part of a more inclusive society.
You are participating in the conference "Refugees and Migrants in Our Common Home," which deals with how to educate people on migration issues. What do you expect from this conference, and what types of questions will you be addressing?
The first thing to do is to remind everyone of the human nature of this mission. We have all, at one time or another in our history, been confronted with migration. We all share common human needs and dignity. I would therefore like to help refocus the debate on the humanity and dignity of what we do and what we strive to do as an organization. I would then like to present some very concrete ways in which universities, the academic community, and students can participate in this effort.
Part of it involves conducting research and presenting facts that contradict some of the misinformation circulating. This information includes, for example, the fact that most migrants move within their region; they do not leave their own region.
Most migrants, especially those displaced by conflict or the effects of climate change, are hosted by very low-income countries that may not have the resources to support them. So how can we help stabilize communities on the move?
We will also discuss awareness-raising, advocacy, and the need to ensure that all communities—academic, social, or religious—can work together to provide more support to those in need.
Pope Leo XIV has already expressed strong opinions on migrants, stating that they are "messengers of hope" and that they remind the Catholic Church of its dimension of pilgrimage. How does his voice support your work at the UN, particularly at the International Organization for Migration?
In several ways. It clearly confers a certain moral authority on communities around the world. And that's really important right now, when the issue of migration has become, as I mentioned, hyper-politicized and polarized. We want to refocus the debate on the human element and how we, as human beings, can build connections and offer support, help integrate communities, enable migrant students, for example, to access education, or migrant workers to access properly paid jobs where they are treated fairly.
To achieve this, we must partly utilize the moral authority that the Church enjoys. But there is also something much more concrete: how each parish, each community, can serve as an example in working with, supporting, and protecting migrant communities. We can bring this down to a micro level, where the Church can be very effective in changing a situation that may seem very abstract on a global scale, even threatening in a global context. But when we bring this back to the local context, we see very clearly how we can create communities that are more supportive of all people. I think our partnership with the Church is essential, and it's something we've really emphasized at IOM.