Welcoming the stranger is key to our faith

I salute the parish of Ardagh on their historic achievement in the Mayo Junior Championship. They truly deserve the success, their first at this level, and it is very fitting that their celebratory flags of green, gold and black on the Ballina-Crossmolina road attest to the sense of achievement that raises both their footballing profile and their club to a new historic level. As with the breakthrough of Mayo this year after a long desert experience, so too with Ardagh breaking through after an extended wait.

I claim a certain, albeit distant, affinity with the parish of Ardagh because James Hoban from the townland of Slievenagark was my great-great-great-great grandfather. Later family members drifted to Rathheskin in Kilfian parish and onwards to Ballycastle where I was born.

Migration, inward and outward, in one shape or another, is a recurring pattern in my family, not just from Slievenagark to Ballycastle but onwards and upwards over more recent years as family members sought employment in distant climes. One aunt and six of my uncles emigrated to New York, Chicago, New Jersey, Leeds, London and Reading - some following siblings who helped them find a place in a new world. Most made a visit home, though two of them never saw Ireland again.

My Uncle Mike, on his one visit home, pointed out O’Grady’s Corner to his mesmerised adult children on their first journey to Ballycastle. Because Mike had spoken so often in glowing terms about downtown Ballycastle and O’Grady’s Corner, his children imagined it as the equivalent of a major intersection, as in their native New Jersey.

My aunt and my six uncles had all married, most of them had children and later grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren with strange surnames like Ollenburger, Smerz and Jasas!

The word ‘migrant’ has a number of different connotations, from complimentary to derogatory, including words that go way beyond derogatory to vitriolic, virulent and gratuitously offensive. Thanks to unprincipled and unscrupulous politicians like Donald Trump who, for nakedly political reasons, have used the word ‘migrant’ to instill fear and loathing into minds and hearts, migrants like members of my family who went abroad in search of a living for their families and who made huge contributions to their adopted homelands, are treated like criminals, intent on undermining and abusing their new neighbours. It is part of the virus that Trump and other criminals have infested the body politic with even in Ireland.

Compare that with the attitude and the example of Pope Leo when he meets migrants on his travels. In June of this year when he was in Spain, at a meeting of migrants, he made a profound gesture. He said: “Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity.” 

It was a compelling reminder that before everything else about us - our nationality, religion, ethnicity and more, we are all human beings deserving of respect and dignity.

When Leo was Prior General of the Augustinians he wasn’t averse to reminding them not to find themselves among those ‘who read the Gospel as if they had no money, and who manage their money as if they had never read the Gospel’. Jesus, he told them, “began and ended with the poor”. And, as with his predecessor, Francis, Leo’s focus on the care of migrants is at the heart of his focus preoccupation with the Gospel imperative of ‘welcoming the stranger’ rather than the imperative of Trump and ICE abusing them at every turn.

In a recent issue of Far East, the magazine of the Columban Fathers, the editorial explained why Columban missionaries stand in solidarity with migrants and refugees and the religious and civil agencies that support them: 

“All people of every ethnicity and religion are entitled to live a life consonant with their inviolable human dignity as beloved children of God. Let us welcome them as our sisters and brothers, made like us in the image and likeness of God, one family, one nation, a magnificent diversity that enriches us all and is truly a blessing from God.”

The writer of the editorial was Fr Patrick McInerney and it is, echoing Pope Leo, as fine a moral and principled definition of our responsibility for migrants and refugees as I’ve ever read and could and should be printed every week in parish bulletins, in schools, in offices and wherever Christians gather.

Compare that definition with Trump’s attitude to migrants, including many young Irish who find themselves in irregular legal situations, and examine Trump’s response to their needs - recruiting thousands of ICE agents from the Migration Enforcement Agency to hunt down and detain the undocumented and to deport them regardless of their circumstances and their individual constitutional rights. ICE uses the harshest and most disrespectful approach to rounding up migrants, wearing masks, intimidating the vulnerable, submitting migrants to violent and sometimes deadly abuse, including separating children from their parents. People like Trump, in America as in Ireland who know no shame, see migrants simply as ICE sees them, as if they have no rights, as if they can be harassed and abused at will.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention. In our world today there are an estimated 42 million refugees as well as almost 70 million displaced people. The Convention continues to point our attention in the direction of the millions of people who deserve respect, welcome, hospitality and protection so that they and their families can live in peace and security. It’s why missionary societies like the Columbans have named migrants and refugees as a priority in their mission.

It is (or at least should be) a priority too for everyone who claims to be Christian as it is grounded in the Gospel where ‘welcoming the stranger’ and helping those who, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, have been ‘left at the side of the road’, are key elements of our faith.

In comparison to this focus, Trump’s ritual abuse of the migrant and the refugee is in marked contrast to the care of Christians that is their due.