Over in the medieval Vatican, the busybody Pope Francis has called upon Europe to accept more diverse refugees from the third world.

The Pope could have shown leadership by admitting a few dozen suffering souls to his diminutive city-state (a real country with ambassadors and a flag), but he has not. He is scheduled to meet with survivor refugees from a 2013 Mediterranean shipwreck which would be a perfect opportunity to ask some to live in the Vatican, but no mention has been made of a forthcoming invitation. Opportunity lost.

Meanwhile, Europe is not exactly bursting with opportunity for job seekers, particularly unskilled Africans and Middle Easterners.

Europe’s agony: Painfully high unemployment, inflation near zero, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), September 30, 2014 • Unemployment among the 18 nations that make up the troubled euro zone held at 11.5 per cent in August, according to the statistics agency Eurostat. In the wider European Union, the jobless rate dipped to 10.1 per cent from 10.2 per cent. • Almost 25 million people can’t find work in the EU, more than 18 million of them in the euro zone. • Greece and Spain continue to have the highest unemployment in the region, at 27 per cent and 24.4 per cent, respectively. • Austria and Germany, at 4.7 per cent and 4.9 per cent, enjoy the lowest. • Among young people, unemployment now stands just slightly below that of July’s level, at 21.6 per cent in the EU and 23.3 per cent in the euro zone. • More than half the youth work force in Greece and Spain is jobless. And in Italy, youth unemployment is now running at more than 44 per cent.

The Pope’s first visit out of the Vatican was to the Italian island of Lampedusa , which has been flooded with thousands of foreign boat people for years

In other refugee news, RefugeeResettlementWatch reminds us that FY2015 begins today (October 1) and one consequence is that 4000 Syrians will be dumped into American communities starting now, with the government lowering screening guidelines to get them in, despite the obvious national security danger.