Since 1986, the Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ministerial care and leadership formation for communities across the country, has actively collaborated with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Pastoral Care of Migrants, Refugees and Travelers.
Last week, I and a few of my colleagues were invited by CMFN’s executive director, Father Tom Florek, S.J., to represent Loyola University at a board meeting held at the historic Woodlawn Jesuit Residence in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Representatives had traveled from around the country, including as far as Yakima, Wash.; Tucson, Ariz.; Boise, Idaho; Stockton, Calif., San Antonio and beyond. The conversations glided naturally between Spanish and English as we explored how the CMFN and our Institute of Pastoral Studies could work together to respond to the need for continuing education and lifelong learning among migrant populations.
Cuban-American theologian Natalia Imperatori-Lee has made the point numerous times that the idea of U.S. Latino/a or Hispanic theology being an “emerging” phenomenon distorts the historical reality that Spanish-speaking Catholics were living in the South and West of what is today the United States for centuries before the influx of other waves of migrants to the Northeast and Midwest.
Of course, the demographics and patterns of contemporary migration have swelled the ranks of Spanish-speaking Catholics in recent decades, both in industrialized urban centers and agrarian locales. But this does not tell the entire story, as the ancestors of many of these Catholic families didn’t cross any border; rather, the border crossed them. Their faith was also in many cases formed by an Iberian rural spirituality and popular piety that were markedly different from other expressions of lived Catholicism, even elsewhere in Europe. Theologian Segundo Galilea asserts that Spanish mystics such as Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila contributed an incarnational spirituality that deeply molded the area we today call Latin America.
Today, the CMFN works with bishops from around the nation to discern how best to serve the pastoral, social and spiritual needs of those who labor unseen in the fields, factories and processing plants, keeping our nation fed, clothed and running. If mission lies at the heart of the Church’s existence, then we must set out to break bread (the literal meaning of “com-panion”) with those of the campos and calles, the fields and thoroughfares where our brothers and sisters are in need and have much to tell us.
Leadership formation in such a context is not something the Church (or academia) can “dole out” from our largesse to those “lacking” education, pastoral action strategies or positions of influence. Rather, the accompaniment that follows from authentic encounter is mutually transformative, where our society can learn a great deal from the voices of those too often deemed voiceless, and our Church can ever more clearly recognize the face of Christ in those deemed invisible.
The CMFN serves migrant, seasonal and itinerant workers and their families, with a range of residency statuses: from temporary visas and victims of human trafficking, to those seeking political asylum or those without documentation. The organization seeks to develop programs for integral formation, as defined in various Catholic magisterial documents as constituted by human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions. Its work takes seriously the call to a “teologia en conjunto,” that is to say, literally a discourse about God “conjoined with” one another.
Many of Jesus’ parables draw on imagery of humble fieldworkers, hardworking laborers or rustic construction teams. We ought not allow our readings of these narratives to become overly spiritualized, whereby we are desensitized and complacent regarding the rampant injustice that so many in these and comparable industries today face; sadly this occurs not only in the wider social currents, but all too frequently, even in our own Church.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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