“Carmen,” 26, is a Guatemalan immigrant traveling with her three young children. After living a terrible experience of family violence in which her husband almost killed her with a machete, she decides to leave her country and seek asylum in the United States. (OSV News photo/Oscar Leiva, Silverlight for CRS)
OFFICE FOR SOCIAL MINISTRY
“To make migration a choice that is truly free, efforts must be made to ensure to everyone an equal share in the common good, respect for his or her fundamental rights, and access to an integral human development … Only in this way will we be able to offer to each person the possibility of a dignified and fulfilling life.” (Pope Francis, message for the 109th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, May 11, 2023)
Pope Francis chose to devote his message for this year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees (WDMR) to the freedom that should always mark the decision to leave one’s native land — “free to choose whether to migrate or to stay.” Our Holy Father says this freedom is a widely shared pastoral concern expressed in the recent synod process of attentive listening to local churches around the world.
The pope’s WDMR message this year focuses on how the freedom of movement is connected to the fundamental Catholic social teaching about the dignity of every human life. “As we work to ensure that in every case migration is the fruit of a free decision, we are called to show maximum respect for the dignity of each migrant; this entails accompanying and managing waves of migration as best we can, constructing bridges and not walls, expanding channels for a safe and regular migration.”
The pope’s message underscores the importance of addressing the root causes of migration while inclusively accompanying all who are striving to build a better future. “In whatever place we decide to build our future, in the country of our birth or elsewhere, the important thing is that there always be a community ready to welcome, protect, promote and integrate everyone, without distinctions and without excluding anyone.”
The migrant “surges” on the Mexico-United States border have presented challenges to such inclusive community efforts. The Diocese of El Paso is responding to the challenge by mobilizing resources to welcome, protect and integrate migrants. The following are inspiring stories from three of the diocese’s parish shelters that daily serve some of the most vulnerable “without distinctions and without excluding anyone.”
Just blocks from the Tex-Mex border is the historic Sacred Heart Church with its many murals portraying migrants’ contributions to the community. The parish has become a landmark for national media coverage of El Paso diocese volunteers accompanying migrants seeking asylum. Miguel is a former border security official who 10 years ago decided he wanted to be part of welcoming and protecting migrants at the border. He offered to help the parish manage a shelter for migrants. Today Miguel works tirelessly with Mama Coco and other parish volunteers who prepare meals for the sheltered migrants, attending to their needs, especially the children and parents weary from their traumatic and dangerous journey.
Margaret is another inspiring volunteer who for many years has welcomed and integrated arriving migrants. She began by securing used mattresses and transforming bathrooms into showers at her St. Ignatius Parish school in downtown El Paso. Today the school building not only shelters vulnerable migrants but provides religious education classes, where children learn how to live the Gospel alongside the latest generation of migrants passing through El Paso. Working with other volunteers and the parish priests (friars from Mexico and Indonesia) Margaret has been instrumental in keeping shelter doors open, even during the most difficult moments of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their beautiful parish church houses a famous shrine to St. Peregrine — the patron of persons with cancer — where migrant and local families gather to pray and work for the health and shelter of all, excluding no one.
In anticipation of the expected May migrant “surge,” the El Paso Diocese set up another shelter at Assumption Parish farther from the center of town. Within a week, Hope Border Institute staff, working round the clock with volunteers from the Red Cross, created a shelter with beds for 120 migrants. Many of these migrants come to the shelter from the government detention center after being processed and given a court date for their asylum hearing. Some volunteers and Hope staff brought their families with them to accompany the sheltered migrants with meals and recreation while they wait for transport to other U.S. cities. On Mother’s Day, shelter staff serenaded the moms, including a young migrant with her 10-month-old baby and a refugee mother with her 8-year-old daughter who fled their indigenous community in South America after their father was kidnapped). For all in this border parish shelter, it was a very memorable Mother’s Day.
These stories illustrate the WDMR message of Pope Francis that “the synodal path we have undertaken as a Church leads us to see in those who are most vulnerable, among whom are many migrants and refugees — special companions on our way, to be loved and cared for as brothers and sisters. Only by walking together will we be able to go far and reach the common goal of our journey.”
For more on Pope Francis’s 2023 WDRM message, please visit humandevelopment.va. For more on faith-community migrant ministry on the U.S.-Mexico border and migration root causes, visit hopeborder.org.
Mahalo,
Your friends at the Office for Social Ministry
Prayer of Pope Francis for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2023
God, Father Almighty, grant us the grace to work tirelessly for justice, solidarity and peace, so that all your children may enjoy the freedom to choose whether to migrate or to stay.
Grant us the courage to denounce all the horrors of our world, and to combat every injustice that mars the beauty of your children and the harmony of our common home.
Sustain us by the power of your Spirit, so that we can reflect your tender love to every migrant whom you place in our path, and to spread in hearts and in every situation the culture of encounter and of care. Amen.
