Migrants are needed in Italy because Italians are not having enough children, Pope Francis said Monday.
"Today many countries need migrants. Italy does not have children, it does not have children. The average age is 46.
Italy needs migrants and must welcome them, accompany them, promote them and integrate them. We must tell this truth," Francis said while receiving the Scalabrinians in audience.
The pope, whose birth name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio as he is descended from Italian immigrants to Argentina, defined migrants as "teachers of hope." He said: "I am the son of migrants, and at home we have always experienced that sense of going there to make America, to progress. They leave hoping to 'find their daily bread elsewhere', as St. John Baptist Scalabrini said, and they do not give up, even when everything seems to be going against them". The government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, who describes herself as a Christian mother, has launched a number of measures to try to encourage Italians to have more kids and raise the country's chronically low birthrate.
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