{"id":6517,"date":"2015-09-06T15:01:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-06T21:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6517"},"modified":"2015-09-06T15:01:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T21:01:12","slug":"migrants-christianity-and-europe-diverse-desperate-migrants-have-divided-european-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6517","title":{"rendered":"Migrants, Christianity and Europe: Diverse, desperate migrants have divided European Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/erasmus\/2015\/09\/migrants-christianity-and-europe?fsrc=gp_en\">Economist<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But not all Italian Catholics, or their would-be political representatives, approve. Over the past few weeks, there have been some cantakerous public exchanges between a senior prelate and a rising politician of the right. Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League party and advocate of a new brand of Italian nationalism, has been sparring with Nunzio Galantino, the secretary of the Italian bishops&#8217; conference. In a barbed rebuttal of anti-immigrant stereotypes, Bishop Galantino said politicians who played on xenophobic feelings were themselves &#8220;street-pedlars&#8221; hawking worthless trinkets; Mr Salvini said that as an ordinary, fallible Catholic he was at least as entitled to speak out as any &#8220;communist bishop&#8221;, and that he knew many people inside the church who shared his feeling that Italians must put their own interests first.<br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>&nbsp;In Germany, progressive church leaders have been among the leading critics of Pegida, an anti-Muslim movement which has organised street demonstrations to denounce what it calls Europe&#8217;s creeping Islamisation. Only a handful of clerics have taken a different view; for example, a certain Father Paul Sp\u00e4tling spoke at a Pegida rally, only to be silenced by his bishop on grounds that such xenophobia is &#8220;not compatible with the Christian message of love, kindness and inclusion.&#8221; Meanwhile quite a lot of German churches are offering asylum to migrants (including Muslims) by letting them live on church property where the police cannot enter and deport them. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economist: But not all Italian Catholics, or their would-be political representatives, approve. Over the past few weeks, there have been some cantakerous public exchanges between a senior prelate and a rising politician of the right. Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League party and advocate of a new brand of Italian nationalism, has been sparring [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6518,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517\/revisions\/6518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}