This September, Fairfield University President Father Jeffrey von Arx and our Center for Faith and Public Life will host a gathering of presidents of Catholic colleges and universities. The issues to be discussed include immigration and undocumented students within higher education. Cardinal Roger Mahony, former archbishop of Los Angeles, has agreed to be our keynote speaker.
Cardinal Mahony has long dedicated much of his ministry to issues regarding the estimated 12 million undocumented people in this country — a group that leaders of both the universal and the local American church urge all people of good will to see as individuals, as mothers and fathers and siblings, and not as unidentifiable demographic masses. In the wake of the recent Deferred Action immigration program regarding those brought to this country as children, the election-year discussions of comprehensive immigration reform, and recurring conversation about the DREAM Act, the cardinal’s commitment to the people one text describes as “living in the shadows” of our society is particularly timely.
Cardinal Mahony has direct experience with large immigrant populations in the dioceses of Fresno, Stockton and Los Angeles. California has by far the nation’s most immigrants, regardless of residential status, but this issue has local ties as well. Recent statistics rank New Jersey third among all states when it comes to immigrant percentage of inhabitants. Cardinal Mahony has made the church’s unequivocal position clear:
“Immigration should be enforced in a proportional and humane manner. But the church also does not condone a broken immigration system in the U.S., one that too easily can lead to the exploitation, abuse and even death of immigrants. In this land of opportunity, it is unacceptable that immigrant workers labor in unsafe conditions for wages insufficient to support their families. It is unacceptable that immigrants, including children, are shackled and detained in deplorable conditions. And it is unacceptable that…immigrants have died by the dozens in the California desert or in other parts of the Southwest. Rather than accept an immoral status quo, our elected officials in Congress should reform, in a comprehensive manner, our legal immigration system.”
Putting the political rhetoric aside, every Catholic is called to respect the dignity of every human life — including those of other nationalities, creeds or ways of life. Such a view is a relatively rare contemporary example of cross-ideological Catholic accord, and is supported by Catholic social teaching on the indivisibility of the family, the common good, and the right to labor going back at least as far as Rerum Novarum in 1891. Cardinal Mahony served as spokesman for combating blanket xenophobic condemnations of “illegal” immigrants as outsiders and job-poachers.
In the City of God, St. Augustine reminds us that we are all passing through this world as peregrini, a word that can mean pilgrim, foreigner or stranger. In ancient Rome and New Testament times it technically designated “resident aliens” that lived within but were not citizens of the Empire. In ancient Rome and New Testament times it technically designated “resident aliens” that lived within but were not citizens of the Empire, a group including Joseph, Mary, and Jesus (as opposed to Paul who held Roman citizenship).
It is rather fortuitous for Christians that when the Holy Family fled Herod’s violent massacres — perhaps less sustained in their ferocity than the drug cartels in Latin America today — the Egyptians did not have a fence patrolled by armed guards or demand passports issued at Luxor to cross the border. Neither did Jesus put paperwork stipulations on his terrifying description of the Last Judgment in Mt 25, “Depart from me, you accursed…For I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”
Author Elie Wiesel survived the atrocities of the Holocaust and knew well the dangers of dehumanizing groups of people for perceived infractions against the state, even if they were so accused while living peaceably in its midst. He argued that while certain acts may be legitimately described as such, “No human person is illegal.”
Cardinal Mahony and other advocates for this population are living examples of Christian witness to the reality that every person regardless of birthplace deserves respect and hope in times of trial.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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