Sept. 06--REPORTING FROM MUNICH, Germany -- Pope Francis called on the faithful Sunday to not only welcome asylum-seekers to Europe but to give them shelter and help them begin new lives, as the leading edge of a migrant wave began dispersing across Germany or moving on to points north and west.
In a span of 24 hours from early Saturday to early Sunday, more than 13,000 people made their way into Germany via its border with Austria, the biggest share of them from war-racked Syria, but with large contingents of Afghans and Eritreans as well.
And at the southern end of the migrant trail, refugees continued to arrive en masse in Greece, having made the short but dangerous sea voyage from Turkey. The crush has fallen heavily on the tiny Greek tourist islands, with clashes breaking out Sunday between migrants and police on the island of Lesbos.
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Germany, the chosen destination of many, sought not to let too heavy a burden fall on any region, arranging special trains and jam-packing regular ones to carry them to Dortmund in the west, Dresden in the east and Hamburg in the north.
On a morning train from Vienna, the Austrian capital, to Munich in southern Germany, asylum-seekers checked the GPS on their mobile phones to make sure they had crossed into Germany, so low-key was the passing of the frontier. A crowd of well-wishers gathered at Munich's train station, waving welcome signs, and the arrivals waved back -- though a police cordon separated them.
The refugees were escorted away for medical checks in tents set up in a square beside the station.
In St. Peter's Square, the pope told a Sunday gathering that it was not enough to merely sympathize with those brought to Europe's shores by convulsions of war and hardship. He called on every Roman Catholic parish to shelter refugees, saying the Vatican itself would take in two families.
"The gospel calls us to be close to the smallest, and to those who have been abandoned," the pontiff said, according to Vatican radio.
Throughout the weekend, migrants and refugees were greeted by Austrian officials and volunteers as they crossed over from Hungary, where many had encountered harsh treatment at the hands of the authorities.
At a main train station in Vienna, a woman in a long black abaya emblazoned with a makeshift badge saying in three languages that she spoke Arabic, German and English spoke gently to an exhausted-looking mother of an infant and a toddler. Another woman, in a red jacket bearing the logo of the charity Caritas, guided a man to the ticket counter, his three school-age girls following like ducklings.
A young engineering student named Mustafa Abdul Qader, from Aleppo, Syria, said he hoped to make it all the way to Britain. But after a harrowing start to his journey -- eight hours in the water after the raft carrying him from Turkey to Greece capsized -- he said he was happy to simply be in the European Union and out of physical danger.
"A shower sometime will be nice," he said.
Those who managed to leave Hungary on a string of more than 100 buses that took them to the Austrian frontier considered themselves lucky. Hungary said the bus service Saturday was a one-time measure to keep refugees on foot from clogging the roadways and posing a safety hazard. By Sunday, more new arrivals had flooded into Budapest and tensions were again rising.
The scale of the crisis -- one of the largest mass movements of people since World War II -- has led some countries previously reluctant to accept refugees to soften their stance, particularly more prosperous ones.
Germany has led the way, saying it expects to receive 800,000 asylum-seekers this year. In France, where there has been little organized effort to provide refugee housing, the Interior Ministry said many municipalities have offered to help place refugees.
Some of the response was galvanized by devastating photos that circulated last week of a 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after he drowned along with his mother and 5-year-old brother as the family tried to make the crossing to Greece.
King is a staff writer and Hassan a special correspondent.
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UPDATES
8:01 a.m.: This article has been updated with pope's comments, details from migrants' journey to Germany.
This article was originally posted at 3:07 a.m.
