Catholic bishops announce nationwide action alert, postcard campaign in support of comprehensive immigration reform

Yesterday afternoon:

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- As the Catholic Church observed National
Migration Week Jan. 3-9, support for legislative efforts took the
forefront amid various other steps to bring attention to the concerns
of migrants and refugees.

In a teleconference Jan. 6, Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake
City, chairman of the bishops' Committee on Migration, described
severalsteps being undertaken by the U.S. bishops, including a new Web site,
a nationwide action alert and a previously announced postcard campaign
toencourage members of Congress to support comprehensive reform. The Web
site is a revamped version of www.justiceforimmigrants.org.

"The American public, including the Catholic and other faith
communities, want a humane and comprehensive solution to the problems
which beset our immigration system, and they want Congress to address
this issue," Bishop Wester said.

(...)

Read the full story by Patricia Zapor of Catholic News Service: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1000047.htm

A new look... and another look

A new look for the newspaper:

We've just completed the redesign of our newspaper -- from flag to folios. Let us know what you think! Of course, you have to pick up the print edition to see just how extensive the redesign really is....

And another look at an issue I write about often: the Catholic Church's commitment to bettering the plight of immigrants and reforming broken immigration policies:

The photos I've included in this post are by freelancer Kevin Cook. They were taken at a Philadelphia Catholic leadership meeting on immigration reform that took place at Our Lady of Ransom School's gymnasium Sept. 11.

Msgr. Hugh Shields, vicar for Hispanic Catholics of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and other Hispanic apostolate leaders addressed approximately 90 people who gathered -- to formulate a genuinely Catholic response to the challenges posed by current immigration policies. An article about the event, written by freelancer Denise Peterson, will appear in the Sept. 24 issue of the Catholic Standard & Times (in English and in Spanish), but here's a teaser:

Sister Pat Madden, S.S.J., who works at the Sisters of St. Joseph Welcome Center in North Philadelphia, attended the meeting at Our Lady of Ransom. “I’m glad to see the energy is back. A couple of years ago we were going to rallies and all, and then it just died. I can feel that the energy is coming back, that the time is now, and that hope is here. The plight of the immigrant is very important to us. Jesus welcomes everyone — lepers, Samaritans, the woman at the well — so we should too.”

On Sept. 17, the Hispanic Bishops of the U.S. met with legislators in Washington D.C. about policy issues most affecting Hispanics in the U.S. This is from a USCCB report on the meeting:

At a series of meetings at Capitol Hill, a delegation of Hispanic Bishops discussed with Democratic and Republican legislators of both houses, four areas of deep concern and offered principles of Catholic social teaching to help in the current debates.

Archbishop José Gomez of San Antonio, Texas, led the September 17 delegation, representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“The bishops are keenly aware of the substantial contributions Hispanic communities make to the prosperity and well-being of the United States,” said Archbishop Gomez. “Yet those same communities suffer under the weight of a broken immigration policy, as well as lack of access to quality education, adequate medical care and economic opportunities.”


“We met with our political leaders of both parties to re-affirm the principles of Catholic social teaching about the dignity of all human beings from conception to natural death and the centrality of the common good. We offered these principles grounded in social ethics and our religious heritage as constructive guidelines for achieving a just and equitable resolution of the public policy debates around these key issues,” he said.

The U. S. Church and our Bishops continue to remind Catholics about the moral implications of current immigration policies, and a debate about the issue that has turned increasingly vitriolic. From Catholic News Service:

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Outside the Capitol Sept. 15 bishops of three denominations led a brief prayer service for an end to hate, particularly hatred toward immigrants.
[...]
"The current environment dehumanizes our fellow human beings and diminishes us as a nation," said Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City, chairman of the migration committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
[...]
Meanwhile, elsewhere on Capitol Hill, 47 radio talk show hosts held a two-day broadcast capping a lobbying effort aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration and derailing efforts to approve comprehensive immigration reform.

Read the CNS brief here (scroll to second brief).

Archbishop Wuerl, of Washington, included the following in an op-ed piece about another fractious issue -- health care reform:

The United Stated Conference of Catholic Bishops, following the Gospel mandate to care for the "least of these," urges us to look at health care from the bottom up. A particular gauge against which to measure true universal coverage would be how reform treats the immigrants in our midst who contribute their labor and taxes to our nation, but are at risk of being left out of health care reform.

Read the full op-ed here (and note comments on the post, if you have the stomach for them).

And Our Sunday Visitor, in an editorial about health care reform and the Bishops' call to cover immigrants in it, notes that:

It may be that what America needs right now is a conscience prick about what society is supposed to be all about: serving the common good, as Pope Benedict XVI so forcefully underscored in his latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.

Read the full editorial here.


Comprehensive immigration reform and the treatment of immigrants in our country is as fractious an issue for the Catholic laity as it is for the rest of the population. Working at a Catholic newspaper I get to see letters to the editor and to field calls from readers who are upset at our priests and religious for their ongoing work to minister to the undocumented.

I get to track poll results from our own newspaper web site that indicate that a substantial number of our readers think the Bishops shouldn't involve themselves in immigration because it is a "political" issue.

But it isn't be the first time we've needed the priests and religious -- and our Bishops -- to remind us that issues of shared humanity and human dignity go beyond the merely political; and that they aren't predicated on race, or ethnicity, or status in society.

Some time ago I fielded an unrelated call that took me into the newspaper's archives. I rooted around in the CS&T issues from the 1960s. By chance I ended up looking at a number of editorial pages. There were lots of letters to the editor in those old issues very similar to ones I'd been seeing about immigration. Catholics were taking the Bishops to task for what the letter-writers saw as meddling in politics. You see, the Bishops had issued statements and were advocating for desegregation... and the readers didn't like it one bit.

Today it is hard to imagine that any Catholic could have wanted the Bishops to stay mute about segregation.

And years from now, I believe, it will be equally inconceivable for us to imagine that any would call for our Bishops to be silent while immigration policies tear families, lives and communities apart.

Prophetic voices are desperately needed (I'm shamelessly stealing this line from one of my favorite CS&T columnists, Msgr. Francis Meehan).

On this issue and in this debate, I'm proud that some of the strongest prophetic voices belong to our Bishops.

What’s in a name?

The letter comes like most of our letters to the editor still do, via snail mail. It’s signed, has a local return address. Good. We don’t publish unsigned letters, and rarely publish those sent from outside our readership area.

Angela opens it, but I take it out of her hands before she gets to read it – I have a small space to fill on the editorial page and if the letter is short enough, or readily edited without sacrificing its essence, I can lay it out and call the page done.

As I scan the first couple of sentences I’m hopeful.

Its impetus, the writer says upfront, is a column that appeared several weeks ago on the bilingual page of the paper, written by Moises Sandoval, a veteran editor, writer and Catholic News Service columnist.

If it’s criticism, I think to myself before continuing to read it, at least I won’t have to console any of the local columnists I’ve encouraged-cajoled-bullied into writing for us. Sandoval’s probably a lot tougher than my guys, I think. He can take it.

Turns out, I’m the one who can’t take it.

The writer is disturbed about the Church’s insistence on humane treatment for “illegals” and tired of the U.S. Bishops’ calls for comprehensive reform of existing immigration laws. That’s disheartening, but not completely unexpected. The results of the poll currently up at the Catholic Standard & Times web site’s homepage (www.cst-phl.com) indicates that a large number of our readers feel similarly, if perhaps not quite so strongly.

But the letter goes downhill from there. It is evident from the statistics quoted in it that the writer uses illegal as a synonym for Latino. And later in the letter, the people crossing into the nation from the southern border are assigned other epithets: Criminals. Leeches. Parasites.

When I hand the letter back to Angela, I am uncharacteristically subdued.

“Don’t people get that we all bleed the same color?” she says after she reads it.

Angela is African American and Native American and I know she doesn’t expect an answer to her question.

“Have you ever seen ‘Stardust?’” I ask after a moment, seeking refuge in non sequitur. “You know, the movie based on the novel by Neil Gaiman?”

She nods.

“Remember how when the prince’s throat is cut, he bleeds blue instead of red?”

We laugh together at the visual pun, then go back to the unending stream of tasks necessary to ensure that a newspaper goes to press on time.

I should probably confess at this point that I have an abiding love of fairy-tales and folktales. I admire the way these stories work – flights of fancy that nevertheless hold real insights. So it’s no surprise that my mind has flown straight from that letter to the editor to a filmed fairy-tale like “Stardust.” Many fantastical stories have as a central conceit the theft, discovery or bestowal of a name. Remember Rumpelstiltskin?

But it’s not only in fairy-tales where names mean something.

When we strip people of their human dignity, we take their names along with it. It allows us to think of people as some collective other. They become “illegals and criminals.” Or “leeches and parasites.” Not made of the same flesh, bone and blood as we are. Not prey to the same worries and needs; not filled by the same joys.

This week the 18-year-old who put a noose around Robert Cantu’s neck, dragged him behind a pick-up truck and threatened to hang him in the town square while yelling “spic” and “border jumper” at the teen, pled no contest to charges of ethnic intimidation (he was sentenced to 10 days in an Ohio jail). The killers of Marcelo Lucero, José Sucuzhañay and Luis Ramirez all attacked their victims as representatives of some fearsome, collective “other” – Hispanic, undocumented, gay.

We’re seeing this unnaming play out in Iran as well.

Governments can be good at turning human beings into a collective “other” to be subdued or jailed or exiled or eliminated. I am reminded of Central America during the bloody, undeclared civil wars of the 1980s – and of how, even beyond those who lost their lives, hundreds of thousands lost their names.

Ah, but then, as in my beloved fairy-tales, something quite unexpected happens.

El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero reads the names of the dead during broadcasts on the Catholic radio station. The day the first civilian president of Guatemala is elected after 30 years of military rule, thousands gather at a silent protest holding up placards with the names of the disappeared. At prayer vigils, neighbors and family read out the names of the 137 victims of homicide in Philadelphia this year. And perhaps most spectacularly – despite the jailing of Iranian journalists (33 to date according to Reporters without Borders) and despite controls on every major form of information dissemination – we all learn Neda Soltan’s name.

At the end of the workday in which I read the letter to the editor, I’m still thinking about names, the words that are substituted for names, and the way a name – given even one person to hold it higher than fear, higher than circumstance – can help us remember our shared humanity.

We all bleed, Angela says. We all hope, I say.

On the way in to the train station I see three homeless people who regularly sit at the entrance I favor. They ask, unobtrusively, for money. Unbidden, a line from Isaiah 49 pushes its way into my thoughts: “The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb He gave me my name.”

I’ve never asked their names.

I’m not so different from the letter writer who precipitated this blog post.

I rummage around for change, then drop the coins into their separate cups as I ask.

Cathy smiles when she tells me.

Earl stammers through his beard.

Poor Boy explains that his is a nickname his mother gave him as a boy, but that it doesn’t mean they were poor.

Next time, I’ll remember.


Photo of immigration rally CS&T file photo. Rumpelstiltskin engraving by Anne Anderson from Wikimedia Commons. Photo of homeless person by Sarah Webb for the CS&T.

Work and pray

There are times blogging comes easily. Some others, not so much.

I’m struggling now with whether I want to write about proposed legislation in California. It proposes issuing different birth certificates to the U.S.-born infants of undocumented immigrants than to any other U.S.-born infants. It would thus become material proof of “second class” status and would sweep away the 14th Amendment’s jus solis category of citizenship for those the state deems “undesirable” [http://www.northcountytimes.com/articles/2009/04/15/news/sandiego/z3a7cb4466b4507ce882575970077d470.txt].

But no, as much as the proposal alarms me – and should alarm any child or grandchild or great-grandchild of immigrants whose citizenship was granted by virtue of having been born on U. S. soil – I just don’t want to delve into what such a proposal means. What it says about the type of nation we are contemplating becoming.

Neither do I want to examine the fact that anti-immigrant groups such as FAIR [http://www.splcenter.org/intel/nativist_fair.jsp and http://www.splcenter.org/intel/nativist_lobby.jsp] have responded to the President’s readiness to begin addressing immigration reform by pledging renewed and increased talk radio and internet attacks [http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-immigration-lobbying-041509,0,446373.story]. Or the fact that the nativist group, according to information on its web site, has been called to testify before Congress on immigration proposals more than any other organization in America.

I don’t even want to write about the illuminating but depressing Catholic News Service article about the Pew Center’s recently released “Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants” [http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0901738.htm] or any of the excellent articles on immigration I read daily in El Diario/La Prensa [http://www.impre.com/eldiariony/].

Instead, I’m tempted to blog Catholic.

It is not something I do often, though faith underpins every entry about immigration and torture and sanctuary and all the personal stories I’ve ever posted here. It’s just that – it may as well be said upfront – I’m hardly the poster child for Catholicism. I was away from the Church almost as long as I’ve been in it, and am no more capable of deep theological thought than your average bear. Forget apologetics or eschatology or whether I prefer Aquinas or Augustine (though an amusing Facebook quiz tells me I’m in Aquinas’ camp) I want to write about a far more mundane aspect of being Catholic.

May 1 is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

This memorial looks not at the saint’s exalted moments of angelic guidance, but at his day-to-day labor as a carpenter and the tradition that, as Jesus’ foster father, he taught Him his trade.

The memorial acknowledges the dignity of work – no matter that it be accomplished with sweat and physical exertion or without formal education – and of the dignity of the human beings performing that work.

It is good to be reminded of this. Our society doesn’t much value certain types of labor, or see artistry in what it considers ordinary. We hardly notice those around us who keep the roads paved, the fields yielding or the shelves stocked. We probably wouldn’t have noticed this simple village carpenter either.

Through this memorial, and in her papal encyclical about the dignity of work, the Catholic Church honors what many of us forget – that nations would founder without laborers, and that they are due every bit as much respect as the white-collar workers who make it onto the pages of Fortune magazine.

A column that will appear on the bilingual page of the Catholic Standard & Times’ April 23 edition [www.cst-phl.com] talks about St. Joseph the Worker and also notes that May 1 marks the national “Day without an Immigrant.” Though the rallies associated with the day have dwindled in recent years, at their peak hundreds of thousands of people gathered in a visible reminder of how many immigrants labor side by side with us; how many of them pray for justice and redemption side by side with us as well.

The author of the column in the CS&T reminds us that in addition to a laborer, St. Joseph was an also immigrant, seeking refuge with his family in lands other than his own. It fits so perfectly, don’t you think? Work and pray. That is what we do together.

On May 1, let’s promise to notice those who labor around us. Let’s notice not the color of their skin or the quality of their language or the status of their documents, but the work of their hands. To paraphrase a U2 song, those are the hands that build America.

Painting of St. Joseph by Georges de La Tour at the top of this blog is from Wikimedia commons' public domain images.

'A degrading spectacle'

“It has come to this: In Phoenix on Wednesday, more than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from the center of America’s fifth-largest city.

The judge, jury and exhibitioner of this degrading spectacle was the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, the publicity-obsessed star of a Fox reality show and the self-appointed scourge of illegal immigrants.”

That is from the Feb. 5 op-ed piece in the New York Times. It is worth reading in its entirety [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06fri2.html?_r=2&scp=9&sq=immigration&st=cse ]

Here is the Associated Press report about the event:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IMMIGRANTS_TENT_CITY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

And the excellent report from El Diario/La Prensa, if you can read Spanish:
http://www.impre.com/noticias/nacionales/2009/2/5/encierran-en-carpas-a-220-indo-107447-1.html

Or, read the Catholic News Service report in the Catholic Standard & Times issue of Feb. 12.

The good, the bad and the ugly

For those of us tracking immigration issues, a roller coaster set of weeks. I’ll start with the positives:

• More than 200 religious leaders advocating comprehensive immigration reform gathered in Washington D.C. Jan. 21 – sandwiched between the inauguration on the 20th and the March for Life on the 22nd. Although the immigration advocates didn’t garner a lot of media attention, they signaled the need for a shift in the direction and tone of discourse about existing policies. "Immigration practices in this country have been undermined by severe and deep constitutional and human rights violations," said Rabbi David Shneyer, director of Am Kolel Sanctuary and Renewal Center at a Jan. 8 press conference announcing the gathering on the 21st. "Now is a time for healing and renewal." (Catholic News Service, Jan. 9)

• Two weeks ago, the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, a partnership of faith-based organizations committed to enacting fair and humane immigration reform, announced a national effort to organize prayer vigils coinciding with the first recess of this session of Congress, February 13-22, when members will be home in their districts. The interfaith coalition is asking people to plan public prayer vigils for their communities of faith, to include prayers petitions concerning immigration reform within worship, and to ask clergy or lay leaders to offer a sermon focusing on immigration during this week. Go to http://interfaithimmigration.org for information about organizing a prayer vigil or to register an event on the event calendar. As I’m blogging this, there is one prayer vigil already scheduled in Pennsylvania: the Latino Ministry - Lehman UMC, Hatboro, Pa. will hold a prayer vigil Feb. 13 at 6:30 p.m. Call 215-470-2229 for more information.

• Senior Catholics officials attending the Jan. 14-18 Vatican-sponsored meeting of families in Mexico City expressed optimism that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama would usher in more favorable immigration policies that include putting an end to the workplace raids separating parents from their children. "We foresee and we hope that the new administration will organize migration in the right way, with contracts and limited-time (stays)," Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, told Catholic News Service.

• Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers gave a speech Jan. 28 at the University of San Diego saying that integration of immigrants "is the responsibility not only of the immigrant but also of the host society" and is achieved through open dialogue. The speech was billed as a preview to an international conference April 15-16 at the Catholic university in California; the conference will discuss the relationships among migration, religious experience and national identity. (Catholic News Service, Jan. 29)

• Amid anecdotal accounts of people being assaulted for speaking on their cell phones in Spanish and the Mummers Parade “Speak English” anti-immigrant float (see my blog entry of Jan. 7, “Oh, Philadelphia!”) comes news that the people of Nashville, Tennessee have voted down a proposal by a councilman that would have barred government employees from communicating with businesses, tourists, hospital patients and crime victims in any language other than English.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090123/NEWS0202/901230395/1017/NEWS03

But, also in the news:

• New York’s governor appointed a new senator with an anti-immigrant voting record.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/politics/28immigration.html
El Diario/La Prensa, which covers immigration stories more fully than almost any other newspaper out there, has a terrific editorial about Gillibrand’s opportunities to rethink immigration policy now that she represents the entire state as senator. Lamentably, though the print and smart editions of the newspaper carried the editorial in both English and Spanish, the web site has it only in Spanish.
http://www.impre.com/eldiariony/opinion/2009/1/31/ayer-marchamos-mantilde;ana-cu-106472-1.html

• The U.S. children of an undocumented Nicaraguan woman in detention in Florida went on hunger strike trying to postpone the deportation of their mother – who was held in ICE detention for more than a month. The children, 9 and 12 years old, came home one day to find their mother gone.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=326572&CategoryId=13003

• Another immigrant died while in detention. The New York Times tracked reports that the death was a result of institutional medical neglect. The facility is the same one where, two years earlier, another detainee died after being denied medical treatment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/28detain.html?_r=1&em

• Anti-immigrant groups released reports this month blaming for Florida’s budget shortfall and the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure (“the potholes!” in the words of one immigration advocate) on undocumented immigrants.
http://www.fairus.org/site/News2/285758413?page=NewsArticle&id=19771&security=1601&news_iv_ctrl=1741 and
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/media/press_release_2009jan05.html


On a seemingly unrelated note, those of you who already know I’m a poetry geek will be unsurprised by the fact that I listened attentively to the inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day” by Elizabeth Alexander when she intoned it on that cold, blustery January day. I can’t say I thrilled to the poem. But I have to admit that lines from it resonate. Especially today, at the end of this particular post:

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

[…]

What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light

[…]

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.


I think about the sentences to be uttered at the prayer vigils in upcoming days, filled with love instead of hatred. And about the candles lit by leaders of many faiths and individuals of good will (and even by some newspapers) that will continue to shed widening pools of light on our human family.

Unexpectedly, without starting out to write about hope, I find myself there.

Powerful, Popular, Perfect and Peaceful

My husband came home from work with a test.

He works at the meat counter of a local grocery store owned, and in large measure staffed, by Mennonites. We often joke that between that and the fact I work at a Catholic newspaper we’re up to our jowls in religion.

It can be, um, a bit overwhelming.

Neither of us can conceive of a company gathering anymore that doesn’t start or end with – or have interludes of – prayer. Family dinners have found us exploring why the expression “Holy smokes” is unacceptable to his Mennonite coworkers and how this intersects with Catholic ritual. We’ve both heard way too many excruciatingly earnest but awful praise-and-worship songs since we started working at our respective jobs, and between us know a battalion of people of faith who spent time in New Orleans helping people rebuild from Hurricane Katrina.

I wonder about how my husband’s coworkers don’t freeze to death wearing dresses in middle of winter as they bicycle to the store from farms many miles away, and he wonders whether priests ever get a day off from wearing clerics. Our daughter just rolls her eyes at us – and makes sure the ear buds for her iPod are in tight enough.

It is easy to talk about the day-to-day of different religions at the dinner table – after all, my mother’s proscription of “never discuss politics or religion” was understood to not apply to family. (Which, it has to be said, included secular humanists, Greek Orthodox, Baptists and a number of members of other religions along with the Catholics … and also just about every value on the political spectrum.)

What proves much more difficult is to talk about religious difference as it plays out on the national stage. Witness all the back and forth about which religious leaders were included in the inaugural events (and which weren’t) and what they said, or didn’t say, or might have said, or implied in their prayers. (Go the blog www.getreligion.org for a provocative variety of entries on this topic or to www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900344.htm for a news story about the role of religion in the inauguration.)

Despite being a person who enjoys a good discussion, I despair of the type of argumentation that seems to follow (or sometimes precede) these displays of civic religion at the national level. The attendant commentary makes God out to be as small and as blinkered as we are – as if the Divine resides only with us, standing among our own people, speaking our own language.

Which brings me back to the test.

A number of my husband’s coworkers have taken a test that asks you to identify your personality traits – all falling into four “types,” according to the authors of the test, powerful choleric, popular sanguine, perfect melancholic and peaceful phlegmatic. It is an updated form of a “four humours” typology that harks back past Renaissance and Medieval thought into classical Greek concepts of healing. In any case, Erla, Ada Mae, Lisa and Janet sent my husband home from work a number of days ago with an explanatory book and a xeroxed version of the checklist of traits, and – because he’s been procrastinating – have asked him every day since whether he’s completed it yet.

I find this touching. Not because of the test itself (although it is fun in a formulaic sort of way) but because it is an effort on their part to try to better understand someone whose life experiences – and beliefs – are radically different than their own.

Is it trivial? Sure. Will it provide a full picture of who my husband is? Not a chance. But it is, in some sense, a sentence flung out as a rope across a deep cultural and theological divide: “I want to know who you are.”

We should all be so brave.