“On my journeys, I am accompanied by the witness of Pietro Bartolo, the doctor of Lampedusa: his ‘Salty tears’ connect the Mediterranean to this desert that stretches for a few kilometres into Syria and Iraq”. Fr. Ivan Maffeis, director of the national Social Communications Office (SCO) of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), wrote this in the weekly newsletter on the margins of the visit that Mgr. Nunzio Galantino, CEI Secretary-General, is making to Jordan. “Common is the dignity of the refugees who stretch out their hands in the hope to embrace a strip of future”, Fr. Maffeis noted. “And common is also the generous answer of those men and women who accept to take on responsibility for them. I write about a Church who is at the forefront in opening doors, and in receiving and integrating those who knock, exhausted, dressed only in their faith”.