Stranger on his Continent

A Stranger Church at Glastonbury, 1551-1553

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Although Catholicism was spreading and consolidating outside of Europe it was declining in the most spectacular manner in what used to be Christendom. In the last few decades, Europe is certainly the continent in which secularisation in the form of de-Christianisation became the most deeply embedded. From this perspective, Europe is an exception compared with the rest of the world including the United States. The vigour and vitality of Catholicism, and of Christianity in general, in zones outside of Europe counterbalance their decline on the Old Continent.

This is to the point that some sociologists of religions suggest that, if this trend continues, Christianity will quickly become an almost exclusively non-European religion. It is in this sense that Bergoglio's election repairs an incongruity. But the election has naturally taken on a vaster geopolitical meaning.

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It is a sign of and illustrates how the weight of Western cultures has been drastically re-adjusted within the international equilibrium. This shift favours emerging, non-Western nations. It is normal that a man of the Church, be he a pope or a simple priest, would draw his Christian values, as well as his own ideas, from the society from which he has come.

And the land in which Bergoglio was trained has a tradition that is indubitably very remote from that of liberal Europe. Matthew also describes the mysterious presence of Jesus in the migrants who frequently lack food and drink and are detained in prison Mt The "Son of Man" who "comes in his glory" Mt The Risen Christ commanded his apostles to go to all nations to preach his message and to draw all people through faith and baptism into the life of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Mt The triumph of grace in the Resurrection of Christ plants hope in the hearts of all believers, and the Spirit works in the Church to unite all peoples of all races and cultures into the one family of God Eph 2: The Holy Spirit has been present throughout the history of the Church to work against injustice, division, and oppression and to bring about respect for individual human rights, unity of races and cultures, and the incorporation of the marginalized into full life in the Church.

In modern times, one of the ways this work of the Spirit has been manifested is through Catholic social teaching, in particular the teachings on human dignity and the principle of solidarity. Migration in the Light of Catholic Social Teaching Catholic teaching has a long and rich tradition in defending the right to migrate. Based on the life and teachings of Jesus, the Church's teaching has provided the basis for the development of basic principles regarding the right to migrate for those attempting to exercise their God-given human rights.

Catholic teaching also states that the root causes of migration—poverty, injustice, religious intolerance, armed conflicts—must be addressed so that migrants can remain in their homeland and support their families.

In modern times, this teaching has developed extensively in response to the worldwide phenomenon of migration. Pope Pius XII reaffirms the Church's commitment to caring for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind in his apostolic constitution Exsul Familia , affirming that all peoples have the right to conditions worthy of human life and, if these conditions are not present, the right to migrate. When this happens, migration attains its natural scope as experience often shows. While recognizing the right of the sovereign state to control its borders, Exsul Familia also establishes that this right is not absolute, stating that the needs of immigrants must be measured against the needs of the receiving countries: Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.

Our concern as pastors for the dignity and rights of migrants extends to pastoral responses as well as public policy issues. The Church in our two countries is constantly challenged to see the face of Christ, crucified and risen, in the stranger. The whole Church is challenged to live the experience of the disciples on the road to Emmaus Lk Faith in the presence of Christ in the migrant leads to a conversion of mind and heart, which leads to a renewed spirit of communion and to the building of structures of solidarity to accompany the migrant.

Part of the process of conversion of mind and heart deals with confronting attitudes of cultural superiority, indifference, and racism; accepting migrants not as foreboding aliens, terrorists, or economic threats, but rather as persons with dignity and rights, revealing the presence of Christ; and recognizing migrants as bearers of deep cultural values and rich faith traditions.

Church leaders at every level are called on to communicate this teaching as well as to provide instruction on the phenomenon of migration, its causes, and its impact throughout the world. This instruction should be grounded in the Scriptures and social teaching.

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Conversion of mind and heart leads to communion expressed through hospitality on the part of receiving communities and a sense of belonging and welcome on the part of those in the communities where migrants are arriving. The New Testament often counsels that hospitality is a virtue necessary for all followers of Jesus. Many migrants, sensing rejection or indifference from Catholic communities, have sought solace outside the Church. They experience the sad fate of Jesus, recorded in St.

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The need to provide hospitality and create a sense of belonging pertains to the Church on every level, as Pope John Paul II said in his annual message on World Migration Day We bishops have the primary responsibility to build up the spirit of hospitality and communion extended to migrants who are passing through or to immigrants who are settling in the area. We call upon pastors and lay leaders to ensure support for migrant and immigrant families. We urge communities to offer migrant families hospitality, not hostility, along their journey.

The building of community with migrants and new immigrants leads to a growing sense of solidarity. The bishop as pastor of the local church should lead the priests, deacons, religious, and faithful in promoting justice and in denouncing injustice towards migrants and immigrants, courageously defending their basic human rights. This should be true in both the sending and receiving churches.

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As leaven in the society, pastoral agents can be instruments for peace and justice to promote systemic change by making legislators and other government officials aware of what they see in the community. Working closely with other advocates for workers and with non-governmental organizations, the Church can be instrumental in developing initiatives for social change that benefit the most vulnerable members of the community.

The Church should encourage these broad-based efforts to provide both a comprehensive network of social services and advocacy for migrant families. Another important resource these communities can offer migrants, especially those seeking asylum or family reunification, is affordable or free legal assistance. A special call is issued to lawyers in both our countries to assist individuals and families in navigating the arduous immigration process and to defend the human rights of migrants, especially those in detention.

Parishes should work together to provide adequate services throughout the community, making every effort to invite parishioners with special expertise lawyers, doctors, social workers to assist generously wherever they can. Pastoral Care at Origin, in Transit, and at Destinations The reality of migration, especially when the journey entails clandestine border crossings, is often fraught with uncertainties and even dangers.

As migrants leave their homes, pastoral counseling should be offered to help them to better understand these realities and to consider alternative options, including the exploration of available legal means of immigration. Prayer books and guides to social and religious services should be provided along the way and at the points of arrival. The migrants should be reminded of their role as evangelizers: Special encouragement should be given to migrants to be faithful to their spouses and families and to thereby live out the sacrament of marriage.

Support of the family that is left behind is also needed. Migration under certain conditions can have a devastating effect on families; at times, entire villages are depopulated of their young people. Dioceses in Mexico and the United States need to work closely to provide a sacramental presence for migrants. Ideally, local parishes should ensure that sacramental preparation is available to people on the move, making special provisions for them given their transitory lives of following work wherever it leads. Eucharistic celebrations or communion services and the Sacrament of Reconciliation should be available to migrants where they can easily attend, and at times that best suit working people with families.

Collaborative Pastoral Responses Ecclesia in America recommends collaboration between episcopal conferences for more effective pastoral responses.

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Collaboration is most needed in the development of a more systematic approach to ministerial accompaniment of migrants. The numbers of migrants who leave Central and South America and Mexico and who enter the United States are so large that a more concerted effort is needed in the preparation of priests, religious, and lay leaders who accompany them. In previous centuries, when immigrants from eastern and western Europe came to all parts of the American continent, the Church in some countries established national seminaries to prepare priests to serve in the lands where others in their country were settling, particularly in North and South America.

In other countries, the Church developed religious communities of men and women to accompany emigrants on their way, to minister to them on arrival, and to help them integrate into their new homes from a position of strength, often by forming national or personal parishes. In still other countries, the Church has developed exchange or temporary programs in which commitments are made to supply priests for a period of three to five years.

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Up to the present there have been individual exchanges of priests between Central and South American, Mexican, and U. This exchange has built up the spirit of collaboration encouraged in Ecclesia in America. These efforts have been very positive, but the results have not been uniform. Careful and generous cooperation between dioceses is important to provide priests and religious who are suited for this important ministry. Guidelines for their training and reception by the host diocese must be developed jointly with the diocese that sends them. During their stay in the host diocese, international priests and religious deserve an extensive and careful orientation and gracious welcome.

As immigrants themselves, they too experience the loss of a familiar and supportive environment and must have the support they need to adjust to the new environment and culture. Periodically, as resources allow, they should be encouraged to return to their home dioceses or motherhouses to rest and to reconnect with their communities. A next step would be to study the possibility of a more comprehensive preparation and assignment of clergy, religious, and lay people who dedicate themselves to pastoral accompaniment of migrants.

Such a study by representatives of both episcopal conferences should focus on the following: The needs of migrants on their journey and at the points of their arrival The dioceses most in need of priests, religious, and lay leaders The possibility of seminaries in Mexico to prepare priests for service in the United States The assignment of religious communities to accompany migrants The study also should include recommendations on ways to build bridges of exchange between dioceses and on effective programs to orient ministers to the new culture they will enter.

This formation should be an integral process of human development, educational enrichment, language acquisition, intercultural communication, and spiritual formation. In order to meet this critical need as soon as possible, cooperation with existing seminaries, schools of theology, and pastoral institutes is highly encouraged. This study should also investigate ways to help the immigrants themselves to continue an active role as lay leaders in the new settings in which they find themselves and ways for the receiving church to animate and encourage them, especially those who served as catechists and community leaders in the country of origin.

We recommend that a special academic subject on pastoral migration or human mobility be included as part of the regular curriculum in our seminaries, institutions, and houses of formation. Another area of collaboration could be in the preparation of catechetical materials that would be culturally appropriate for migrant farm workers. Several examples already exist that reflect the collaboration of dioceses along both the United States-Mexico border and the Mexico-Guatemala border.

This cross-border collaboration has already reaped positive results, such as the development of legal services, social services, cooperation with houses of hospitality along the borders, and prayer books for the journey. Joint prayer services at the border, such as the Posadas , Good Friday vigils, and All Souls rites to cherish the memory of those who have died, also have been held. To develop and continue the cooperation between the Church in the United States and Mexico, we bishops encourage ongoing dialogue between bishops and pastoral workers on the border, exchanges between dioceses, and continuing meetings between the USCCB's Committee on Migration and the CEM's Episcopal Commission for the Pastoral Care for People on the Move.

Ecclesia in America summed up these pastoral recommendations as follows: The Lifeblood of Many Mexican Families Mexican workers who labor in the United States send large portions of their wages, which they have earned by the sweat of their brows, back to their families in Mexico. A certain number of work visas should be created to allow laborers to enter the country as legal permanent residents. Family ties and work history in the United States are two of the possible factors that should be considered in allocating such visas.

A visa category featuring permanent residency would recognize the contributions of long-term laborers and would ensure that their labor rights are respected. Alarmingly, migrants often are treated as criminals by civil enforcement authorities. Misperceptions and xenophobic and racist attitudes in both the United States and Mexico contribute to an atmosphere in which undocumented persons are discriminated against and abused. Reports of physical abuse of migrants by U. Border Patrol agents, the Mexican authorities, and in some cases, U.

In the United States, documented abuses of migrants occur frequently. To be sure, the large majority of Border Patrol agents conduct themselves in a professional and respectful manner. But there exist those who perpetrate abuses and who are not held accountable by the U. In addition, the U. Mexican children intercepted along the U. Children from Mexico and other countries in Central America often are not given the option to contact an attorney, guardian, or relative, or to file for asylum. These practices must stop. Because of their heightened vulnerability, unaccompanied minors require special consideration and care.

Mexican enforcement of immigration laws, targeted specifically through racial profiling of migrants attempting to reach the United States, has been marked by corruption, police brutality, and systemic abuses of basic human rights. Migrants often are forced to bribe Mexican police to continue transit and, if unable to produce payments, are beaten and returned to the border. Because of the lack of rights and policies that drive undocumented migrants away from small urban areas, the migrants often are assaulted by bandits in the border area between Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, and Tecun Uman, Guatemala.

We know of migrants from Central America who pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to shepherd them through Mexico but who, in some cases, are kidnapped. Their families never hear from them again. Although we acknowledge that the government of Mexico has improved the administration of the migration system and is attempting to bring the rule of law to it, Mexican immigration policies remain unclear and inconsistent. Corruption continues to weaken the Mexican migration system and to hurt the common good.

We urge the Mexican National Migration Institute to strengthen the participation of civil society organizations in its Delegation Councils 22 as partners to bring healthy transparency to the country's migration system. In order to address these excesses, both governments must create training mechanisms that instruct enforcement agents in the use of appropriate tactics for enforcing immigration law. We urge the U. In addition, the enforcement function in both nations should be left to federal authorities the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Border Patrol in the United States, and the National Migration Institute and Federal Preventive Police in Mexico , not transferred to local police who necessarily have other priorities and who are untrained in the proper methods for enforcing immigration law.

Military personnel from any branch or service should not be used to enforce migration laws along either country's land borders. Border Enforcement Policies Of particular concern are the border enforcement policies pursued by both governments that have contributed to the abuse and even deaths of migrants in both Mexico and the United States. Along the United States-Mexico border, the U.

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These initiatives have been characterized by a tripling of Border Patrol agents, especially at ports of entry, and the use of sophisticated technology such as ground sensors, surveillance cameras, heat-detecting scopes, and reinforced fencing. Rather than significantly reducing illegal crossings, the initiatives have instead driven migrants into remote and dangerous areas of the southwest region of the United States, leading to an alarming number of migrant deaths.

Since the beginning of , official statistics indicate that more than two thousand migrants have lost their lives trying to cross the United States-Mexico border, many from environmental causes such as heat stroke, dehydration, hypothermia, or drowning. The blockades also have contributed to an increase in migrant smuggling, in which desperate migrants pay high fees to smugglers to get them into the United States. In recent years, smuggling has become a more organized and profitable enterprise.

In southern Mexico, similar policies have resulted in countless migrant deaths along the Suchiate River, most by drowning. Another cause for concern is the presence of Mexican checkpoints—far from most urban areas and difficult to monitor for human rights abuses—which are manned by military and federal, state, and local police agencies along the country's borders and interior.

Because these checkpoints are used as "choke" points for arms, drugs, and migrant smuggling, there is an unfair tendency to associate migrants with criminal activity. We urge both the U. Care should be taken not to push migrants to routes in which their lives may be in danger. Border Patrol has recently launched a border safety initiative to prevent migrant deaths.

We ask the Border Patrol to redouble their efforts in this area and to work more closely with community groups to identify and rescue migrants in distress. We also urge more concerted efforts to root out smuggling enterprises at their source using a wide range of intelligence and investigative tactics. In other church documents, the U. Similarly, we call upon both nations to undertake joint efforts to halt the scourge of trafficking in human persons, both within our hemisphere and internationally. Trafficking in persons—in which men, women, and children from all over the globe are transported to other countries for the purposes of forced prostitution or labor—inherently rejects the dignity of the human person and exploits conditions of global poverty.

Both governments must vigilantly seek to end trafficking in human persons. Mexican authorities must strengthen efforts to identify and to destroy trafficking operations within Mexico. Together, both governments should more effectively share information on trafficking operations and should engage in joint action to apprehend and prosecute traffickers. Due Process Rights Congress eviscerated due process rights for migrants with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act IIRIRA , which authorizes the detention and deportation of migrants for relatively minor offenses, even after they have served their sentences.

Congress to revisit this law and to make appropriate changes consistent with due process rights. We also urge the Mexican government to honor the right to due process for all those who are in the country, specifically documented and undocumented migrants who do not now enjoy due process and who may be removed from the country for arbitrary reasons.

Recognizing such a right only strengthens the rule of law in a country and further legitimates its institutions. Once apprehended, migrants often are held in unsanitary and crowded prisons, jails, and detention centers, in Mexico and the United States, sometimes alongside serious criminal offenders. Migrants without documentation should not be treated as criminals, should be detained for the least amount of time possible, and should have access to the necessary medical, legal, and spiritual services.

Asylum seekers who pass an initial "credible fear" interview should be released. As defenders of those who flee persecution in foreign lands, we are increasingly troubled by the asylum policies employed by both the United States and Mexico. Most alarming is the prospect of creating a North American exterior boundary system in which asylum policies would be regionalized in such a way as to deny asylum seekers appropriate judicial remedies and protection.

Increasingly, asylum seekers from across the globe are smuggled through Central America to Mexico and the United States.

They come from as far away as China, India, Iran, and Iraq. In most cases, they have valid claims for protection, but many are swept up in anti-smuggling initiatives in Central America and Mexico and are sent back to their persecutors without proper screening. The denial of asylum adjudication rights is an especially acute problem along the United States-Mexico border.

In fact, expedited removal is most heavily used against Mexicans. Along the southern border of Mexico, migrants are returned on a regular basis to Central America without screening. Denying access to asylum procedures, making them complicated, or not providing clear information about them in languages that people can understand is a grave injustice and violates the spirit of international law and commitments made by both our countries.

We restate our long-held position that asylum seekers and refugees should have access to qualified adjudicators who will objectively consider their pleas. We urge both countries to take a leadership role in the Regional Conference on Migration Puebla Process and to work with our Central American neighbors to ensure that asylum seekers and refugees throughout our hemisphere have access to appropriate due process protections consistent with international law. Consequences of September 11 Terrorist Attacks for Migrants These men, along with their wives and children not named in the document, formed a so-called stranger church at Glastonbury, one of several communities of Protestants who had come to England fleeing Catholic persecutions on the continent in the reign of the Protestant King Edward VI.

Born in Lille around he graduated from the University of Louvain in and in the s was a prominent figure in the Calvinist church in Strasbourg. With rising Catholic persecution across Europe in the s Poullain became one of a group of prominent foreign reform theologians who were either enticed to England or sought safe haven in the kingdom. Thanks to the recommendation of the theologian Peter Martyr, whom Cranmer had made Regius Professor at Oxford the previous year, Poullain secured a position as tutor to the son of the Earl of Derby.

Through Somerset Poullain was appointed the superintendent of the fledgling Glastonbury community, a post which combined the roles of mayor and minister to the small congregation. In this role Poullain not only cared for the physical and administrative needs of the congregation but also, on the model of John Calvin, devised his own liturgy. The Glastonbury settlers were almost entirely weavers, specifically weavers of worsted cloth. This technique, while common in the Low Countries, was little known in England and could offer substantial rewards to the man who controlled the supply; and by insisting on priority trading with the new community, Somerset could effectively control that supply.

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