By Mark Zimmermann
Catholic Standard / OSV News
WASHINGTON — Rather than passing by a suffering victim like the priest and the Levite did in the parable of the good Samaritan, Americans need to take action to support immigrants who are in this country without documents and are suffering under the government’s mass deportation policy, Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy said.
“For us as a nation we can pass by no more. We must stop, recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name, and fight every dimension of it,” Cardinal McElroy said at a Mass for the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees Sept. 27 at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington.
“We must seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil or replace them,” the cardinal said. “We must shed our identities as priests and Levites and become like the good Samaritan who recognized no boundaries in rescuing the victim by the side of the road.”
“We come here to celebrate our history as a nation of migrants,” Cardinal McElroy said at the start of the Mass, which was sponsored by the Office of Cultural Diversity and Outreach of the Archdiocese of Washington. “We come here to pray for and welcome all those who have come to this land, and especially and most deeply we remember and pray for today those who are in the undocumented communities as their time on the cross stretches onward and they know the peril, the fear, the overwhelming sadness that dawns upon them because of the policies of our government.”
In his homily, he tied together the parable of the good Samaritan with what has unfolded in the U.S. under the government’s mass deportation policy since last year.
Cardinal McElroy said that in the past 18 months in the United States, the biblical mandate of welcoming the stranger and respect for the American heritage of immigration “have been replaced by suspicion, division, cruelty and violence.”
The parable of the good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke at the Mass “is clear,” he said. “Both the priest and the Levite witnessed the suffering and pain of the robbers’ victim. They recognized what was happening; they heard the call of pain; and they moved carefully to the other side in order to insulate themselves from having to take any action. They simply passed on by.”
In abandoning the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger and the Statue of Liberty’s promise to immigrants — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. …” — the nation risks “losing our soul,” he said.