Pope Francis washes the feet of migrants and refugees during Holy Thursday Mass March 24, 2016. / L’Osservatore Romano.
CNA Staff, May 6, 2021 / 06:10 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Thursday that “aggressive forms of nationalism and radical individualism,” exposed during the pandemic, are having a severe impact on migrants worldwide.
In his message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, issued May 6, he said that the coronavirus crisis had highlighted the deep divisions between human beings.
“Our ‘we,’ both in the wider world and within the Church, is crumbling and cracking due to myopic and aggressive forms of nationalism and radical individualism,” he said.
“And the highest price is being paid by those who most easily become viewed as others: foreigners, migrants, the marginalized, those living on the existential peripheries.”
The World Day of Migrants and Refugees, instituted in 1914 by Pope Pius X, is celebrated annually on the last Sunday in September. This year it falls on Sept. 26.
In his message for the day’s 107th commemoration, entitled “Towards an ever wider ‘we’,” Pope Francis addressed what he called a “twofold appeal,” to Catholics and the wider world, to embrace those on the margins.
He urged Catholics “to make the Church become ever more inclusive.”
“In our day,” he wrote, “the Church is called to go out into the streets of every existential periphery in order to heal wounds and to seek out the straying, without prejudice or fear, without proselytizing, but ready to widen her tent to embrace everyone.”
“Among those dwelling in those existential peripheries, we find many migrants and refugees, displaced persons and victims of trafficking, to whom the Lord wants his love to be manifested and his salvation preached.”
He appealed to those outside the Church to work with Catholics to build “a future of justice and peace.”
“Our societies will have a ‘colorful’ future, enriched by diversity and by cultural exchanges. Consequently, we must even now learn to live together in harmony and peace,” he commented.
He continued: “Today’s migration movements offer an opportunity for us to overcome our fears and let ourselves be enriched by the diversity of each person’s gifts. Then, if we so desire, we can transform borders into privileged places of encounter, where the miracle of an ever wider ‘we’ can come about.”
The pope argued that greater solidarity was also necessary “to ensure the proper care of our common home.”
He said: “Ours must be a personal and collective commitment that cares for all our brothers and sisters who continue to suffer, even as we work towards a more sustainable, balanced and inclusive development.”
“A commitment that makes no distinction between natives and foreigners, between residents and guests, since it is a matter of a treasure we hold in common, from whose care and benefits no one should be excluded.”
In an intervention prepared for a Vatican press conference launching the pope’s message, Cardinal Michael Czerny noted that the text developed themes in the pope’s latest encyclical, Fratelli tutti.
Referring to the pandemic, he said: “We are all suffering in different ways. What happens when the survivors in a lifeboat must all help to row to shore? What if some take more than their share of the rations, leaving others too weak to row? The risk is that everyone will perish, the well-fed and the starving alike.”
Czerny, the under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, added: “Widening the Good Samaritan attitude — overcoming selfishness and caring for all — is essential to survival.”
During the press conference, a video campaign for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees was presented, featuring Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso describing the situation on the border between Mexico and the United States.
He said: “I’ve found the most rewarding opportunities of my life serving here at the border. I’ve learned that borders can be vibrant places of encounter and welcome — encounters that enrich us. I’ve learned that we are all interconnected as one human family. We stand or fall together. We build walls and fences which divide us. Today people of faith need to be bridge builders.”
Speaking via video link, Bishop Paul McAleenan, an auxiliary bishop of the English diocese of Westminster, said that the pope’s message offered encouragement to Catholics in the U.K.
He said: “Pope Francis draws our attention to the interconnectedness of humanity: my decisions and actions here affect others who are far away.”
“Three areas in particular directly affect the human family today. The decision of the United Kingdom to reduce its aid budget compounds the suffering of the world’s poorest. Nations engaging in the arms trade bring endless misery to those in places of conflict. Our contribution to the climate emergency results in droughts, disasters and displacement thousands of miles away. Understanding the reasons for migration must include the acknowledgement that we are not blameless.”
Also speaking via video link, Sarah Teather, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, said that in her work she witnessed the lack of solidarity that Pope Francis described in his message.
“Faced with those who fled their homes and sought sanctuary, the asylum system builds walls of suspicion to stop them receiving the protection they need,” she explained.
“It detains them and enforces destitution. Destitution makes many vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and they speak of the sense of losing themselves through years struggling at the margins.”
She highlighted the success of a project in which religious congregations and families welcome homeless asylum seekers into their homes.
She said: “Together, they create a counter-culture to the hostile public policies that render people homeless and marginalized.”
“In small, concrete ways, we can all participate in this shared project to recompose a common human family. For there are treasures to be found when we strive together to break down walls that divide us. The dream of one human family is a dream worth realizing.”
Pope Francis closed his World Day of Migrants and Refugees message with an appeal to people to “dream together” of a better future for all humanity.
He concluded with a prayer:
Holy, beloved Father,
your Son Jesus taught us
that there is great rejoicing in heaven
whenever someone lost is found,
whenever someone excluded, rejected or discarded
is gathered into our “we”,
which thus becomes ever wider.
We ask you to grant the followers of Jesus,
and all people of good will,
the grace to do your will on earth.
Bless each act of welcome and outreach
that draws those in exile
into the “we” of community and of the Church,
so that our earth may truly become
what you yourself created it to be:
the common home of all our brothers and sisters. Amen.
[…]
@Letter to the Gazette
“Catholics do not oppose abortion for religious reasons” (Fr Ryan Sliwa). That is correct in context of natural law and discovery [discovery of natural law principles in Thomistic terms is the inherent apprehension of the intellect]. Natural law principles are not just religious principles, they are also the basis for justice and civil law.
“Catholics on this topic is very like that of the American mainstream, i.e. a majority is in favor of legal abortion, at least in most cases. The natural law tradition to which Fr. Sliwa refers is honorable and interesting, but by no means philosophically mandatory” (follow-up letter by John M. Connolly).
From a Catholic perspective Connolly ignores the fact that natural law is the basis of most juridical findings of right and wrong. Nor does the former professor acknowledge that natural law is the basis for moral law and religious doctrine. That most Catholics reject Church teaching [perhaps wrongly dismissed by Fr Sliwa] doesn’t remove the efficacy of Church doctrine based on natural law [the principles of natural law are apprehended through reasoned observation] as well as revelation.
For Catholics, Connolly’s unfortunate but correct view that most Catholics are not opposed to abortion – based on their refusal to obey the Church, their reliance on their own concepts of scientific knowledge, an indiscriminate libertarian idea of the common good is an apostasy from the truth that begs chastisement. If Sodom was destroyed for homosexuality by fire from heaven, how greater the wrath of God for those who sacrifice their own infants in their idolatry to material goods, that is, to the prince of this world? Unless our bishops take a necessary, courageous stand, Catholics [seemingly a majority] are destined for retribution.
The Continental Stage (#2 re Synodality)…Hurray, we have 26 “experts! We are all saved!
But, what’s the difference, if any, between these experts “compiling, aggregating, and now synthesizing” the synodal Plebiscite and, say, a low-cost kitchen blender? Of the synodal flip charts, no questions asked?
Who needs Successors of the Apostles when we can have—all kiss their ring now, or whatever–“experts!” But the article is dated Nov. 22, so we must ask and even hope that the more recent and striking remarks from Cardinal Quelette and even Pope Francis (below) might signal some kind of redirection? Or not?
A jaundiced eye might notice that Quelette (and Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer) are both over the age of retirement, and now fear that upstarts Grech and Hollerich are now positioned/ postured to replace even their dicastery offices and the Deposit of Faith with the new dispensation of 2023/24—that the ambulatory synodal process itself IS the message?
Lemming pie, anyone?
In the resurgent and anti-Christian, syncretic and natural religion of Islam, such a “paradigm shift” is well entrenched and called “abrogation.” The totally inscrutable God is simply incoherent. So, now, within the collapsing/relapsing walls of the Vatican, are the good guys winning, or not? Consult the “facilitator” bishops, subservient now to anointed/ascendant “experts”!
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/11/28/return-to-the-spirit-of-the-acts-of-the-apostles/
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/11/28/pope-francis-explains-to-america-magazine-why-women-cannot-be-ordained-priests/
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/11/28/pope-francis-jesus-did-not-create-bishops-conferences/
Liberalism and Religion (#1: symposium on Liberalism, Religion and Constitutionalism): I am reminded of a presentation and discussion yours truly delivered at a Newman Center, after which I sat with an Islamic barrister from Pakistan, a graduate student on scholarship studying western Constitutionalism (!)…
In the medical world an MRI image is sharpened by first adding high-contrast dye to the patient. In retrospect, and at the risk of preening, I propose that I added dye to the triangular theme of the Notre Dame Conference. The title of my subject book was/is: “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque [religion], the Manger [religion, but very different] & Modernity” [Liberalism and Constitutionalism, both very different] (University Press of America, 2012).
What do the distinction between Church and State, and then Catholic Social Teaching, have to say to both the rationalism of radical Secularism and the fideism of radical Sharia Law? Better than monologue or even dialogue is the three-way approach again open to the historical fact of the Incarnation. The 2017 CWR author-interview gives a peek. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/04/29/the-mosque-the-manger-and-modernity/
But there are – can be – circumstances when a Catholic must resist abortion on grounds of religion.
Bringing it to your attention. This would apply to all Natural Law issues and it demands vigilance.
Ultimately, the local is managing the Synod. The “Continental Phase” helps to add things to his bucket.
My bishop said this past week that it’s not the numbers that count so much in the responses to the recent parish survey; rather, he is noticing that “when the ‘ parish synthesis ‘ is read back to the parishoners” or “to the parish” it is being absorbed and accepted enthusiastically, everywhere.
He said that it’s a choice that has to be made between maturing into inclusivity and dialoguing or excluding yourself through “egotism and wilfulness”; and that his experience is that the Synod is progressing with very positive development according to this mode. People are understanding it for what it is.
“None of the surveys returned complained that what is going on is questionable. All submissions were along the lines of people acknowledging this or that; and adding, but this also.”
I have to relate some background, though. Over the past 15 years the Life in the Spirit Seminar has taken over the forefront in many if not all parishes. It has a central control of which the bishop was a part before he became bishop. To them all this is not merely normal, it is the Holy Spirit in every instant; and in every instant, extraordinary and miraculous. It’s not “inclusivity” or “dialogue”.
Liberalism
Has everyone watched the EWTN video on the ‘Liberal’ ‘Progressive’ ‘Democrats’?
EWTN’s ‘Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ video will show you how the, ‘Liberal’ ‘Progressive’ ‘Democrats’ infiltrated the Catholic Church to destroy the Catholic Church. The Progressives started after WWI and have grown to become 800 covert organizations world wide, with the goal to destroy Christ’s Church. The Progressives have many operatives at top positions of power in our Catholic Church today.
https://youtu.be/ZnKB9NzgD4k
@ At Four Types of Theology.
David Schloss’ introductory premise is that the existence of God is virtually self evident knowledge according to Aristotle’s first principles. We simply need to contemplate existence to realize this. No need to prove, that came later with skepticism.
Either something is self evident or it’s not. Contemplation of existence can mean anything, here, most likely reasoned enquiry. God is known through reason exactly as the Apostle argues in Rm 1. That is why God gave us an intellect. Whereas the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth is not arrived at by reason, rather by faith. Faith that is the gift of grace. A supreme truth to which all other principles or truths are peripheral. Self evident as revealed to the intellect, lesser or subsidiary principles support this supreme truth as the measure of reason. The truth of Christ’s revelation of the Father, God is the rule to which reason acquiesces. That is why Catholicism teaches it is only in and through Christ that we know God.
All theology including the four ‘types’ of theology Systematic, Biblical, Historical, Practical are better served with the appreciation that all theology has its root and anchor in Christ’s singular revelation of God the Father.
Thank you, Father, for your response. I greatly appreciate your criticism and feedback.
God Bless.