Prior to and since his election as pope, Jorge Bergoglio has referred to issues of immigration and refugees as one of our time’s most pressing concerns.
His first papal trip outside of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, the nerve center of the European immigration debate where many Africans and Middle Easterners seek to enter Europe to find a better life. While there he called to mind Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). He spoke of the “inhuman global economic crisis, a serious symptom of a lack of respect for the human person.”
The pope referred to the deaths of immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, and the reaction to such events, as “shameful,” and called for renewed efforts “to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated.”
Earlier in his career, Francis, himself the son of immigrants, claimed that immigration is actually a primary lens through which we can view the entire history of revelation and the Christian life. Whether it be Abraham, Moses, the Holy Family, or the wandering and subsequently exiled people of Israel, God has chosen again and again to reveal himself and his message through wandering immigrants and refugees.
Even the self-emptying movement of kenosis and Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity could be seen as a type of metaphysical migration. The Bible is much more explicit and repetitive in its demands to welcome the foreigner and treat aliens and asylum-seekers with justice, than it is in its teaching regarding to some of the more common social, sexual and family issues of our times where the church’s stance is more well-known.
The Gospels and St. Augustine both refer to the Christian as “in but not of the world,” a sort of pilgrim “passing through” experience that is reminiscent of the immigrant’s life and hardhsips.
Then-Archbishop Bergoglio put it this way:
“An immigrant is someone who has to leave what he has to go to the unknown. Now, this is strange. God came to save us through immigrants. When he called Abraham, he did not tell him ‘Look. Now I am going to choose you. Construct a temple right here where you are.’ He said ‘No. Emmigrate. Leave your land, home of your father.’ And all of the chosen people were immigrants; and the patriarchs, and the prophets, were immigrants. And Jesus was an immigrant. The infant had to escape so that Herod wouldn’t kill him. There are so many Herods now – but that’s another topic. The early church, like an immigrant, it had to flee in all directions when that tremendous persecution in Jerusalem was unleashed. And from there the Gospel was spread. Salvation is closely connected to immigration and salvation in that sense… Because an immigrant brings a culture that should be assimilated in some way, he should be accepted and should be adopted by the country that receives him. To be an immigrant is to live a restricted existence -between the country they left and the new country they find. And they love both of them. But they only have one heart. The heart of an immigrant suffers from a great loneliness. He lives a restricted existence.”
For any Christian to knowingly and willfully add to that suffering and “restricted existence” is antithetical to what it means to live a life devoted to love of neighbor and of God. The Samaritan and the waylaid traveler were certainly “alien others” to one another in the Master’s tale, an important idea to keep in mind when thinking about these issues.
Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., of Collingswood, is a Research Associate at Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies in Northeast England.
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