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Our Common Home
Two weeks ago, we were shocked and sadden by a tragedy beyond words. 51 migrants from
Mexico and Central America died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer without air conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat on the outskirts of San Antonio.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths on the Southwest border in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported in the previous year and the highest since it began keeping track in 1998. Most were related to heat exposure.
In ancient times, hospitality to aliens, welcoming strangers, offering kindness to newcomers was considered a religious act. In the Bible we find many incidents and instructions of kindness and acts of mercy to strangers. To the nomadic people in the arid wilderness of the Middle East receiving hospitality may be literally a matter of life and death. When you are out there in the desert with no food or drink, your survival relies on someone else’s kind generosity.
In Egypt Israel has experienced not only hostility, but also humiliating slavery. This experience serves as basis for scriptural teaching of hospitality towards strangers: “you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34 et al.).
At the end of our nation’s last great era of large-scale immigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 75% of U.S. Catholics were foreign-born. Like our ancestors, all immigrants seek a better, more dignified life in this land of freedom and opportunity.
Today’s Genesis story is about Abraham’s swift and generous welcome of the three mysterious strangers who in the end brought the blessings for the posterity.
The Catholic bishops of Mexico and the United States stated in their joint letter, Strangers No Longer, “We judge ourselves as a community of faith by the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.”
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI states: “Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance… In the end, by opening the door to the stranger, we are opening the door to Christ in our lives” (Caritatis in Veritate).” Pope Francis says: “The current influx of migrants can be seen as a new ‘frontier’ for mission, a privileged opportunity to proclaim Jesus Christ and the Gospel message at home, and to bear concrete witness to the Christian faith in a spirit of charity and profound esteem for other religious communities” (Address to the National Director of Pastoral Care for Migrants, September 22, 2017), while reminding us of the most basic fact that God has created our earth to be the common home of all our brothers and sisters.
In this common home, may we continue to grow in our deeper realization that we are all brothers and sisters and overcome the fictitious chasm of ‘we versus them’.
Fr. Paul D. Lee