A deported Central American mother cries with her family outside the National Institute of Migration building in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, April 5, 2021. (CNS photo/Jose Luis Gonzalez, Reuters)
OFFICE FOR SOCIAL MINISTRY
“It is time to recognize migrants not as interlopers and intruders, but as people who reveal the face of Christ in their love and courage and who enrich us by their presence.” (Bishop Mark Seitz, June 2021)
Seeing Christ in the stranger was a recurring theme at a recent Catholic Church meeting in Mundelein, Illinois, earlier this month. It was an “emergency” gathering of members from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), bishops from Central America and Catholic organizations responding to the surge of migrants and refugees to the United States. Bishop Mark Seitz from El Paso, Texas, who has been accompanying and strongly advocating for immigrants along the U.S.-Mexican border, said, “It is time to seek new pathways and understandings of the place of migration within the human story.”
Addressing the meeting via Zoom, Cardinal Michael Czerny, the undersecretary of the Vatican Migrants and Refugees Section, underscored the fact that migrants are human beings deserving the same dignity and respect as everyone. “The movement to relocate voluntarily or as a result of dislocation is normal throughout human history and is part of our Christian DNA. Those who move are just as fully human as those who stay put.”
Quoting Matthew’s Gospel, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Cardinal Czerny encouraged the bishops in their efforts to respond “to the needs of strangers” by working with local and national organizations to develop pastoral ministries that are connected through every stage of a migrant’s journey. “Depending on where the diocese is, the parishes might encounter one or more of departure, transit, arrival, short- or long-term settlement, and even the return of migrants. And in each case, the migrants are ‘our’ parishioners, whether briefly or long-term, whether practicing Catholics or of other faiths or no religion at all.”
At the two-day conference, groups comprised of bishops, experts, and those involved in migrant ministry brainstormed responses to questions such as, “How can enhanced collaboration aid the entire church in the United States in a robust pastoral response to the expected significant increase in arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as refugees in order to effectively welcome, protect, promote and integrate people on the move?”
In Hawaii, the diocesan Office for Social Ministry (OSM) has encouraged collaboration among parishes and community partners to assist displaced people on the move. For example, OSM has been supporting the work of the University of Hawaii Refugee and Immigration Law Clinic with parishes on citizenship workshops for all migrants and pro bono legal services for Central America asylum seekers.
Many of the UH law clinic clients are single mothers with children, or unaccompanied youth fleeing civil unrest and violence in their countries of origin and additional trauma en route to the United States. As pandemic restrictions ease, the UH law clinic plans to work with the USCCB’s Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC). The USCCB created CLINIC to be a resource for expertise and training for family-based immigration, naturalization, temporary employment authorization, and relief from deportation.
Embracing the Gospel value of welcoming the stranger, CLINIC promotes and protects the dignity and rights of immigrants in partnership with a dedicated network of community legal immigration programs. Dioceses where CLINIC is active have seen a significant increase in the capacity of existing legal services. The UH Refugee and Immigration Law Clinic and CLINIC plan to provide parishioners throughout Hawaii an opportunity to learn more about their migrant neighbors and to be trained to assist in the delivery of desperately needed legal services.
For more about CLINIC, please visit www.cliniclegal.org. We hope to have more soon on this promising opportunity to reveal the face of Christ and to witness to Jesus’ words: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Mahalo,
your friends at the Office for Social Ministry
