Italy struggles in wake of latest migrant tragedy

On Monday, the Italian coast guard found the bodies of 25 men who were apparently asphyxiated by motor fumes on a small boat crammed with 300 African migrants. The officials found the corpses _ all young men _ after boarding the boat just a few miles off Lampedusa, the small island closer to North Africa than the Italian mainland.

Some of them were stowed away in the hold, which also served as an engine room. As the air became un-breathable from exhaust fumes, the men tried to exit but the 15 metre boat was too packed for those standing above to move aside. Those on board included 36 women and 21 children as well as some 50 Somalis, fleeing famine in the Horn of African region.

According to the survivors, the boat had set sail from Libya on Saturday, carrying people mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, the latest in a wave of arrivals since a military campaign to oust Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi began. Medical officers believe the men could have died shortly after the boast set sail. The UN refugee agency says about one in ten migrants is likely to drown or die from poor conditions during the sea crossing.

Some 40,000 people have arrived in Italy by boat in recent months. Dozens of those boats are filled with sub-Saharan Africans who were working in Libya, then lost their jobs and feared for their lives as conflict erupted. In April, a boat believed to be carrying 300 migrants from Libya capsized, leaving 250 people presumed dead.

Many of Italy's migrant and refugee centers have become overcrowded, slowing the country's ability to sift potential refugees, from economic migrants seeking work in the European Union.

Underscoring the potential volatility of an increasingly desperate situation, also on Monday immigrants held at a detention centre in the southern Italian mainland city of Bari clashed with police, leaving over thirty people injured. The immigrants – mostly young men from sub-Saharan Africa - occupied railway stations and hurled objects at police vans. They have been at the centre for several months and were protesting lack of progress in processing their requests for asylum.

In his Message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees this year, Pope Benedict XVI underscored that the plight of these people concerns us all. In the message entitled, “One Human Family” he writes: "Welcoming refugees and giving them hospitality is for everyone an imperative gesture of human solidarity, so that they may not feel isolated because of intolerance and disinterest" (: Insegnamenti II, 1 [2007], 1158). This means that those who are forced to leave their homes or their country will be helped to find a place where they may live in peace and safety, where they may work and take on the rights and duties that exist in the Country that welcomes them, contributing to the common good and without forgetting the religious dimension of life”. Listen: 00:02:44:81