Estimates for the number of seasonal or permanent migrant farmworkers in New Jersey range from 25,000 to 40,000. Even these high numbers cannot keep up with the demands of a growing national population, as an unfolding agricultural crisis has seen nearly 150,000 farms go out of business in the last five years, with many owners citing both worker shortages and the problematic H-2A visa program as central challenges to their ability to maintain ranches, farmsteads and nurseries. As made clear by magisterial documents like “Rerum Novarum” and “Mit Brennender Sorge,” the Church has a perennial duty to reflect upon our public, political and commercial lives in every age, and to work tirelessly for justice, solidarity and dignity regarding both Catholics and non-Catholics who constitute and contribute to our contemporary society.
Because of a longstanding personal and professional relationship with Father Tom Florek, SJ, the executive director of the national Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network, and the generous support of the Lilly Endowment, I was able to help collaborate with a team at Loyola University Chicago to structure a week of formation for leadership among lay and ordained ministers accompanying farmworkers in their faith and daily struggles. The gathering, titled “Vayan y Den Fruto” (“Go and Bear Fruit”), ran from June 16-21, and brought together 50 experts and ministers from roughly 20 dioceses – from Yakima, Wash., to Venice, Fla., from Mexicali, Mexico, to Rochester, N.Y., and many in-between. There is virtually no area of North America that is not in some way touched by such people directly, whether it be your local blueberries and eggplants, your annual Christmas tree or the wheat for the hosts millions consume at Mass each Sunday.
Father Tom’s organization continues to advocate for the rights, both practical and spiritual, of the communities that provide produce, milk, meat and plants for our tables and homes. Integrating that work with the university experts helped ground conversations in a deepening fluency in Church history, developing technology, community organizing and Ignatian mysticism. The week argued, as we often do in my unit of pastoral formation, that learning is a lifelong process and so “continuing education” is not an extrinsic niche specialty, but rather intrinsic to what it means to “do theology” in the modern world. Seeing bishops with pectoral crosses and migrant farmworkers in sombreros meet specialists in social analysis and systematic theologians was a sight no one in the room will be quick to forget. Drawing on and benefitting from the ample resources of a large Catholic university, the bilingual structure enabled everyone to participate and offer perspectives about how we are all called, as one memorable phrasing arising out of the fields put it, to turn our attention to laboring to “take the crucified Pueblo de Dios [People of God] down from the Cross.”
The ongoing hope was to grow the concrete, communicative and mission-oriented resource hub of the Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network, and with its partners, to take “próximos pasos” (“next steps”) in articulating a vision for the future of this type of ministerial protagonism. Obviously such work, if it is to be a truly ecclesial one, must take place in the midst of prayer, liturgy, and with an eye toward transcendent realities like the Good, the Beautiful and the True – as well as where social discourses are distorting such ends toward their inverses, even if sometimes bedecked in Christian garb.
Along with support from academic and USCCB structures, we were delighted to share personal welcome letters from the cardinal of Chicago, as well as the heads of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and Pontifical Commission for Latin America. The fact that such busy offices took the time to address the network, composed mainly of people who had at one time been farmworkers themselves or ministers who have been called or thrust into direct service of such brothers and sisters in the Lord, argues for the indispensability and urgency of “broad-casting” the bounteous potential of the faith far afield in our day – a verb originally taken from the flinging of seeds to the surrounding soil, whether it be fertile and receptive or bleak and inhospitable, “in season or out of season.” (2 Tim 2:4)
An alumnus of Camden Catholic High School, Cherry Hill, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”
