I was invited by the School of Theology and Religious
Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC to deliver a
lecture on the topic of Immigration and Theology. I was honored to receive the
invitation, and am very grateful for the hospitality afforded me during my
brief stay at CUA. For those who may wish to read my remarks, I reproduce the prepared
text here. I apologize for its length, but it is what it is.
+df
“Immigration as a Theological Paradigm for Faith and Social Justice”
Hispanic Innovators of the Faith Lecture Series, Catholic University
of America
24 February 2015
First of all, I am somewhat daunted by the
invitation to speak at a lecture series dedicated to Hispanic Innovators of the
Faith, daunted by the expectations that such a title might conjure in the
hearers, as if I were invited here because I have something novel to say about
the Gospel and the mission that ensues from it. Novelty and newness are terms
used analogously in the Gospel, and equivocally in the popular lexicon. The
former implies a kind of springtime latent in the rhythm of nature and grace,
while the latter resembles the discovery of a new software guaranteed to make
your iPhone work faster. I approach this lecture with a sense that springtime
is more to be longed for than software.
I have chosen to speak about Immigration as a
Theological Paradigm for faith and social justice. In a lecture like this, I
aim to offer three or four points worth thinking about more, rather than a
summary of 20 points we already know something about. I am not looking to
rehearse the Church’s teaching on Immigration, which is readily
available for those who would like to know of it. Nor have I chosen a path this
afternoon that seeks to concentrate on my sense, as a bishop on the
Texas/Mexican border, of what the current phenomenon of immigration looks and
feels like on the ground. That is a talk for another time, and one I have given
in various forms on other occasions. I want to speak in a decidedly theological
way, looking at the reality the immigrant lives from the perspective of the
faith of the Church.
The human mind in general, and the theological
mind in particular, is involved in an immigrant journey, a kind of itinerant
trek in search of something better. When we are honest with ourselves, in
moments of lucid self-awareness, we know that this is an urgent journey. It is
not a vacation journey, it is a more like a hike wherein we seek signposts
in a strange land, in search for real food. Intelligibility is the food of
the mind, and without it we wither to listless foraging on ideas that do not
nourish, they only anesthetize. I thank you in advance for the patience you
will need to listen to the path my thoughts take today. I hope in some way not
to anesthetize you.
I.
INTO THE WOODS
Think of this lecture as a kind of theological
passage Into the Woods. Like the play and the movie, I will begin with a
few primary stories. They will serve as exempla, in order to
draw out some important theological truths. An exemplum is not the same
as an anecdote. In the world of contemporary rhetoric, an anecdote is what you
tell when you don’t have statistics. In theological discourse, an exemplum
is a narrative you choose in order to invite the hearer to perceive more
concretely and clearly a reality worthy of contemplation. Hopefully, the
encounters I will describe in the exempla will cross
paths at some later point in the lecture. That they should actually converge by
the end may be too much to hope for.
Driving by the Bus Station
In June of last year, before the steady stream
of Central American children crossing the Rio Grande River into McAllen and
Brownsville turned into a media event and a political problem for Congress and
the White House, the first people to notice something big was happening were
women and men from some of our local parishes. These were ordinary folks, hobbits
in a world of Stewards, Elven Lords, Nazgul, who were passing by the McAllen
bus station, going about their daily routine. They noticed mothers with young
children in obvious distress, waiting in large numbers for their buses. They
stopped, and began to speak with them. They quickly learned that these were
mothers with children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were
released by immigration officials to find their way to relatives elsewhere in
the United States. I need not go into the detail here about how immigration
officials decide such things; that is another story. Nevertheless, the
distressed mothers and children waited there for the right bus. They were
dehydrated, had not had a change of clothes since they began the trek across
Mexico three or four weeks prior, and had not had a decent meal since they had
left their native countries. The parishioners spontaneously and immediately
began organizing themselves, to take food and water to the bus-station. They
bought little back-packs for the children to pack canned food and water for the
journey. This went on for weeks. The numbers grew, and everyone involved, from
immigration officials, to the bus-station managers, to the concerned
parishioners realized that much more was needed. That is when the whole
operation, organized now by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, moved
to the parish hall of Sacred Heart Church near the McAllen bus-station. There
the mothers and children were received, welcomed, given a place to take a
shower, get a medical check-up, and get fresh clothes for the journey to New
York, or Pittsburgh or California or Chicago, or wherever. (Todo el mundo tiene un primo en Chicago.)
A Young Man in Honduras
In September of last year, I had an opportunity
to travel with a small group from Catholic Relief Services to Honduras and
Guatemala. I was anxious to go to Honduras and Guatemala in some way to see for
myself the situations that were causing so many young people to make the
dangerous trek across the interior of Mexico in order to reach the United
States. I can assure you there is no better group to travel with in these
countries than CRS, especially if you want to get a perspective that ranges
from what is happening on the streets of Tegucigalpa to what is happening en
las oficinas del Ministerio del Interior.
In the city of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, we
visited the small facility set up by local officials to receive the young
Hondurans being repatriated from Mexico. By that time in the humanitarian
crisis that we witnessed over the summer, the US government had shifted
significant attention toward Mexico in the effort to get the Central American
youths apprehended and returned to their native country before ever reaching
the Rio Grande River. The busses had not yet arrived when we visited the modest
facility, but there was a 16 year old staying there for a day or two. We spoke
to him a bit, careful to respect his experience, and his situation. My Grandmother used to
tell me: no seas muy preguntón porque muestra falta de respeto. (Don’t ask too many questions, as it can imply a lack
of respect.) He was quite willing, though, to let us know
what he was thinking, and what he had been through. He had tried at least five
times to get to the United States, but had only gotten as far as San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He had established himself there a couple of different
times. He had worked for a trucking company; he even went on deliveries into
the US, but had not stayed here while working for the company in San Luis. His most recent return
had been from Mexico.
Trataré otra
vez, seguro que sí.
Aquí no
hay nada. No hay trabajo, no tengo familia, y si no quiere uno cargar drogas te
matan. Quisiera ir pa los EEUU, pero si no alcanzo, me quedaré en
México, por lo menos ahí tienen
trabajo, convivio. Usted sabe, hay vida. ¿Qué quiere hacer en los
EEUU? Quisiera tener una familia, una casita, vivir bien.[i]
A Hillside in Guatemala
Later in the trip, we were in Guatamala City. On
the outskirts of the city we visited a little settlement on the side of a hill
near a running river. We climbed down a fairly steep pathway that led to a flat
embankment about half-way up from the river. I would say there were several
dozen families living there, in huts constructed from pieces of wood and
aluminum sheets, obviously materials that had been discarded by businesses.
Wooden slats for roofs, cardboard coverings over the windows, dirt floors, all the
dwellings were in various stages of completion. These mothers, fathers,
children, living in a community of families, were from different parts of the
country, mostly the rural areas. They came to the city in search of work and a
place to build a life. They showed us their plans to build a little school
room, and showed us how they had already built a small series of water
receptacles for catching the rain water that came from the smaller streams that
led to the river below. The river water was itself undrinkable due to waste
dumped further up. In any case, facilities for cooking, washing clothes in
common, and for looking after the children were in place. They had received
some help from a Korean Evangelical Church to get the water system functioning,
and seminarians from the Scalabrini Order came weekly to give instruction to
the families. They had a well-organized leadership, and the elected leader, a
young man of about 25 years old, lived at the entrance to the settlement. His
duty was to keep drug dealers and gang members away.
Hemos llegado de
varias partes del país.
Lo que tenemos en común
es el querer salir de zonas donde no hay esperanzas de mantener a la familia, y
educar a los hijos. Aquí hemos batallado, pero
hemos conseguido algo de trabajo. Además, luchamos juntos para el bien de los niños. Sí tenemos esperanzas de
ir construyendo algo mejor. ¿Sus jóvenes tienen deseos de ir para los EEUU? No hemos
visto a ninguno de aquí saliendo para los
EEUU. A veces los jóvenes
lo piensan, pero les decimos que es peligroso ir para allá. Y de todos modos aquí estamos construyendo
algo bonito.[ii]
II.
VOICES WITHIN EARSHOT
Asking
you to hold in your mind the people and circumstances I have just described, I
want us to move on now to listen to a few people whose voices can help guide
this jaunt of ours this afternoon.
Paralysis as symptomatic of the post-modern West
Walker Percy, speaking both as a novelist and as
a medical doctor, once wrote that “the consciousness of Western man, the layman in particular, has been
transformed by a curious misapprehension of the scientific method”.[iii] Percy argued that the misapprehension involves the presumption that
the scientific pattern of measureable similarities and resemblances can in fact
tell me who I am as an individual. He continues:
What I am about to say is no secret to the
scientist, is in fact a commonplace, but it is not generally known by laymen.
The secret is simply this: the scientist, in practicing the scientific method,
cannot utter a single word about an individual thing or creature insofar as it
is an individual but only insofar as it resembles other individuals.[iv]
Essentially, Walker Percy proposes that
individuals in our cultural environment (ámbito cultural) have surrendered personal
sovereignty in what matters most, to experts who are in principle not capable
of attending to the issue at hand. The problem with scientific paradigms
administered by experts is that they are receptive to the individual and to the
particular only insofar as they bear similarity and resemblance to the pattern
conceived. Science never has been able to offer an apprehension of the
individual as individual, only an apprehension of the individual as pertaining
to a class, or type, or paradigm.
Walker Percy diagnosed the problem arising from
the popular misapprehension as a loss of self: What I do suggest is that a
radical loss of sovereignty has occurred when a person comes to believe that
his very self is also the appropriate domain of “them”; that is, the appropriate experts of the self.[v] It is important to note that when Walker Percy
uses the term “layman” in this context, he refers to ordinary folks who are not experts in
the scientific fields, especially in the sociological and psychological world.
He is not talking about laity in the Church, he is talking about those of us
who are not scientific experts of one kind or another.
This misapprehension, which is not the fault of
science, but rather the inevitable consequence of the victory of the scientific
worldview accompanied as it is by the dazzling credentials of scientific
progress. It, the misapprehension, takes the form, I believe, of a radical and
paradoxical loss of sovereignty by the layman and of the radical impoverishment
of human relations—paradoxical, I say, because it occurs in the
very face of his technological mastery of the world and his richness as a
consumer of the world’s goods.[vi]
It is worth noting at this juncture that Pope
Benedict put considerable intellectual energy into describing the disaster that
ensues when the scientific paradigm is the only one admitted to the theatre of
reason. I do not want to follow that path of thought right now, but I would say
that on this topic I think Walker Percy is not far from terrain covered by
Joseph Ratzinger.[vii] Walker Percy does not hesitate to call the result a cultural
pathology with many manifestations:
One is the isolation, loneliness, and alienation
of modern man as reflected in the protagonists of so many current novels, plays
and films. This alienation can be traced to a degree, I think, to this very
surrender, albeit unconscious, of valid forms of human activity to scientists,
technologists, and specialists.[viii]
As a novelist, Walker Percy tries to address
this situation by showing us modern persons in motion, or at least attempting
to move. His characters are individuals, flawed, self-consumed at times,
anxious, yet longing to get over some kind of internal paralysis. Paralysis is
for Walker Percy, the human affliction of our time. Some people are
severely paralyzed, (Binx Bolling at the beginning of the Moviegoer). Some are
more or less paralyzed, depending on how successful they are in regaining
self-possession of themselves as selves.
Now then, I suggest that one can legitimately
read the opening chapters of Evangelii Gaudium as a call to the Church
to overcome a kind of sweet paralysis not unlike what Walker Percy elucidates.
The Holy Father, writing 30 years later, describes the way the general ailment
diagnosed by Percy as epidemic in the modern West, shows itself in the particular
context of the Church’s members:
And so the biggest threat of all gradually takes
shape: “The gray pragmatism of the daily life of the
Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is
wearing down and degenerating into small-mindedness.” […] Disillusioned with reality, with the Church
and with themselves, they experience a constant temptation to cling to a faint
melancholy, lacking in hope, which seizes the heart like “the most precious of the devil’s potions”.[ix]
Pope Francis goes on to say that the
privatization of faith has led to “a general sense of disorientation, especially in the periods of
adolescence and young adulthood”, and that “we are living in an information-driven society
which bombards us indiscriminately with data—all treated as being of equal importance—and which leads to remarkable superficiality in the area of moral
discernment.”[x] This manner of speaking points to an ecclesial version of paralysis.
We are sometimes quite unable to figure out what it would be good to do,
or even how to decide what it would be good to do. From Walker Percy to
Pope Francis, the cultural problem in the advanced West could aptly be called “motion-less sickness”.
Where are We, Anyway?
It was not Walker Percy’s fault that his analysis of the cultural malaise is described as
extending deeply into the consciousness of Western man. He was a
brilliant novelist and thinker nourished in the culturally rich and often
self-contradictory American South. I think what he was describing, and what
Popes Benedict and Francis often advert to when discussing the malaise, is more
accurately ascribed to the economically and technologically advanced West. (For
purposes of this lecture, I will identify this as the “ETA West”.) Geographically speaking, Mexico, Honduras and
Brazil are just as much “West” as Washington DC or Louisiana. Culturally, there are deep eddies of
life in Latin America that swirl at the confluence of European, Indigenous and
African and North American cultures. But then, these same eddies swirl in the
United States, albeit in different proportions and configurations.
Perhaps, as Carlos Fuentes once intimated, this
notion that Latin America is not really a part of the West goes back to the
historical ascendency of other European powers over the Spanish Empire at the
time the Americas were being settled by Europeans.[xi] In any case, one of the things that centers of higher education in
the United States, be they Catholic universities or not, definitely need to
address is the sorrowful lack of literacy about Latin American history and
culture. How can we talk about the culture of the West without taking into
account the millions who take pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of
Guadalupe every year, or the hundreds of thousands who decide over time to
embark on a dangerous journey from Honduras to McAllen, Texas, and beyond?
Western culture is not just economically and
technologically advanced culture, it is also still very much a pilgrim culture,
and an immigrant culture. Diverse worlds do exist side by side in the West. A
good window into some of the basic elements of this reality, worlds coexisting
side by side, can be found in Mario Vargas LLosa’s novel La Guerra del fin
del mundo, (The War at the end of the World).[xii] It is a complex story built around the peasant
rebellion, religiously inspired, that shook Brazil in the late 19th
Century, and convulsed the world of Brazilian economic interests, and the world
of the recently empowered Brazilian republican government. These worlds still
coexist throughout the Americas: the worlds of religious fervor, economic
interests, and paternalistic secularism.
This novel, I think, is one of the great pieces of 20th
Century literature. My point is that I do not know how we can realistically
think about ourselves in the US if by “ourselves”
we do not include the vibrancy of the history
and cultures to the South of us, and the vibrancy of the histories and cultures
present here with us. So, I would like to re-cast Walker Percy in a way that I
do not think he would find disagreeable. Great swaths of Western Culture are
not in paralysis. On the contrary, they are, from the point of view of many in
the ETA West, too much on the move.
A Theological Question
At this juncture, I should like to cite number
198 of Evangelii Gaudium. The Holy Father says to the Church: We need to let
ourselves be evangelized by the poor. The new evangelization is an invitation
to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the
center of the Church’s
pilgrim way.[xiii] Let us try to take seriously what this
theological statement might imply. Pope Francis is asking to the Church in the
ETA West to re-engage the resources that can overcome the the gray
pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, that listless lack of hope that
the Holy Father, quoting Bernanos, describes as the most precious of the
devil’s potions.
The ladies and men who stopped at the bus
station to help persons in obvious distress, while they were on their way
somewhere else, illustrates many vital aspects of a vibrant Christian culture:
They were observant, personally involved, resourceful and decisive. They
exhibited a spontaneous willingness to act personally in favor of the
immigrant. This kind of resourcefulness is always remarkable, but the Holy
Father is saying that it should also be normative for a Catholic. Where does
such Christian creativity come from? The resources informing this creativity
are first and foremost theological in character. The Holy Father describes the
theological resource in the following way:
Accepting the first proclamation, which invites
us to receive God’s love and to love him in return with the very
love which is his gift, brings forth in our lives and actions a primary and
fundamental response: to desire, seek and protect the good of others.[xiv]
Pope Francis draws from the deep spring of
Patristic and High Medieval theological contemplation of the Scriptural
Revelation when he uses this language. To explore this source of living water,
I will move now to Saint Thomas, who on this point is a master at collating the
Scriptural and Patristic tradition before him.
III. CHRIST CRUCIFIED AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
And so for purposes of addressing this question,
I would like to point us toward Saint Thomas’s treatise on the Passion of Christ.
Saint Thomas at the Bus Station
In Question 46, Article 3 of the Tertia Pars
Thomas asks whether there was any more suitable way of delivering the human
race than by means of the Passion. He responds with a number of reasons of
theological convenience, drawn from the tradition of Scriptural interpretation,
synthesizing them admirably. But the first reason he gives reads as follows:
In the first place, man knows thereby how much
God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies
the perfection of human salvation; hence the Apostle says in Romans 5:8: "God
commends His charity towards us; for when as yet we were sinners . . . Christ
died for us" [xv]
For Thomas in this text, the mystery of the
Christ Crucified stands as shorthand for the whole kerygmatic announcement of
the Church. It is after all what Simon Peter first announced after Pentecost.
Note the way Pope Francis’
text mirrors exactly the dynamic of grace traced
by Saint Thomas: We know we are loved and are thus stirred to love in
return. I insist that anyone who seeks to understand Thomas’s use of Scripture in the Summa should go to his commentaries
on Scripture to discover the background and depth of the original citation. In
this case, since Thomas cites Romans 5:8, we do well to attend to Thomas’s wider approach to Romans
5, specifically verses 5 through 8, where Saint Paul says the following:
The love of God is poured forth into our hearts,
by the Holy Spirit, who is given to us. For
Christ, while we were as yet weak, at the appointed time, died for the ungodly.
For only with difficulty, for a just man, will one die; yet perhaps for a good
man someone would dare to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we
were yet sinners Christ died for us.
Thomas, following Paul, never disassociates the
death of Christ from the work of the Spirit inciting us to a real sharing in
the love there manifested on the Cross. This is described in great textual
detail in the commentary on Romans 5, and it is reflected in the text of III,
46, 3: God manifests Christ Crucified, we know thereby that we
are loved, we are stirred to a love in return. And in this consists
salvation.
Thomas explains in his comments on Romans 5, 8,
that that which Christ did, that someone might die for the impious and the
unjust, has never been found before. And thus, Thomas continues, rightly
should it be regarded with astonishment that Christ has done this.[xvi] Astonishment, wonder, amazement, these are all terms describing the
reaction of the human person confronted with the death of the Son of God on the
Cross. By the work of the Spirit we are amazed by the love of Christ manifested
on the Cross, and by faith in this love, we are stirred and thus made
capable of loving God in return. This love in return is of course a real
participation in the Trinitarian life, that is to say, in the love of the
Spirit, by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father.
Speaking of the Holy Spirit in this context, Thomas notes that for us to be
given the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and of the Son, is for us
to be prompted (induced, stirred, incited) to a participation in the love who
is the Holy Spirit, by participation in whom we are indeed made lovers of God
[xvii] The provoking of our affections is first and foremost a work of
Christ and the Spirit; but its aim and trajectory is the utter and complete
sweeping of our human intellect and will into the whirlwind of Trinitarian
life.
This is exactly what the Holy Father signals
when he says that acceptance of the mystery of God’s love in Christ moves us to
love him in return with the very love which is his gift. Theologically,
this is what the Church means by charity. Charity is a much impoverished word
in the modern ETA West, but one which I think we can gratefully say Pope
Benedict exerted a great deal of effort trying to re-cast and recover for us.
Our response of charity is made possible by grace, and it’s arising in us is the saving act of God.
It is a cornerstone of Thomas' reading of Saint
Paul that the love of God poured into our hearts is the same act by which we
are made able to love God in return. So, in answer to the age old exegetical
question about what Paul intends when he speaks of the "love of
God"-- does he mean God's love for us or our love for him?-- Thomas
answers with a simple "yes". God's love, manifested on the Cross and
apprehended in faith, bears dynamic fruit in our graced ability to love him
in return. Essentially, this is what Thomas means when he says in III, 46,
3, that the perfection of salvation consists in loving God in return.
Thomas says this admirably well in his comments on Galatians 6, 15, where Paul
says for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails us anything, nor
uncircumscsion, but a new creature.
Faith formed by charity, therefore, is the new
creature. We were created and brought forth into the being of nature through
Adam; but that creature was already old, and grown old, and thus the Lord
bringing us forth and constituting us in the being of grace, made a new
creature. [...] And it is said new because through it we are renewed in
a new life, and this through the Holy Spirit, [for it says in] Psalm 103, 30: send
forth your spirit, and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the
earth. And this occurs through the Cross of Christ, [for it says in]
II Cor 5, 17: if any are in Christ Jesus, they are a new creature, etc.
Thus therefore, through the new creature, namely through faith in Christ
and the charity of God, which is poured into our hearts, we are renewed,
and conjoined to Christ. [xviii]
Clearly, Thomas reads Saint Paul as one who both
teaches the complete gratuity of justification, and the effective manifestation
of that justification in the interior transformation of the human person into a
free agent capable of loving as God loves. The first effect of this
transformation is the act of faith, its consummation is the enkindling of
charity in the human heart. Grace runs its course, so to speak, when we are
able to love God in return, in a way commensurate to the grace of our
perception, in faith, of the love manifested by Christ on the Cross.[xix] Faith formed by charity, therefore, is the new creature.
Putting the Poor at the center of our Pilgrim
Way
Within the context of Thirteenth Century
society, it is not so easy to know how the phrase and man is thereby stirred
to love Him in return, was understood. It was most assuredly
embedded in a broader context than our own, since it was an engrained element
of life in Thomas’
day that Christ could be found in many disguises
among the poor. The medieval hagiography and iconography of Saint Martin of
Tours with the poor man, Saint Francis and the leper, for example, or the
popular plays presented on Cathedral doorsteps, all reinforced this wide
context. Our reading is likely more personalized, because we come to this kind
of text after the long march toward privatized piety and personalized religion.
Unless we make a conscious effort to widen the horizon, we will read the stirred
to love him in return only as a call to a personal act of love directed to
the Crucified.[xx]
If there is a motion-less sickness in some quarters
of the Church, it is quite probably due to an impoverished perception of where
the Christ to whom we must respond can actually be found. Either that, or we no
longer take seriously enough Matthew 25: 31-46 (what you did for the least
of mine, you did to me). This text complete with the seriousness of the
judgment announced at the end, is the Scriptural context of both Thomas saying
salvation consists in our response to Christ, and to what Pope Francis means
when he writes of our primary and fundamental response to the
announcement of Christ Crucified and Risen: to desire, seek and protect the
good of others. Our own lethargy to
attend to the good of others is put on trial when we encounter a person,
young or old, who risks everything in hopes of something better.
One thing is for certain, though, the women and
men who came to the need of the immigrant at the McAllen bus station were not
paralyzed, nor were they afflicted with the gray pragmatism of
diminished personal sovereignty. They exemplified the dynamism of grace Saint
Thomas describes, and that Pope Francis pleads with us about. These ordinary
parishioners were motivated by a genuine desire to attend to Christ, and to
love him in the person found literally by the side of the road. It was as if
their salvation depended upon it. And according to Saint Thomas, who teaches
that our salvation consists in the response to the love we have received, in a
very real sense their salvation did depend on it. There is no loving Christ in
return that is not a practical and effective response to Christ present in the
least among us. This is precisely the point the Holy Father presses when he
says that the gift of God’s love brings forth in our lives and actions
a primary and fundamental response: to desire, seek and protect the good of
others.
The grace of Christ aims to effectuate in us a
right apprehension and an appropriate responsiveness on the human level. This
is the level where grace first insinuates a change in us. I am talking here
about the grace by which the Church beholds Christ, and responds to Him. In
this sense, the internal challenge to the Church in addressing the immigrant is
similar to our internal challenge when addressing the unborn child. Grace by
its very teleological structure begins by clarifying our apprehensions. What do
you see? I see the love of God on the Cross; I see a mother holding a baby at a
bus station; I see a child in the womb. People, the saying goes, see what they
want to see. But the grace of conversion would have us see what is truly there
so as to respond appropriately. How will I respond? This is the question
upon which my salvation depends
Charity and Justice
From this hill-top, we can see how Christology
spills forth into Ecclesiology, Moral Theology and Social Justice. How we face
the challenge of responding to Christ Crucified necessarily influences our
engagement with the world outside of the Church. The Church, that is to say,
all of us who claim to be both believers in and disciples of the Lord Jesus,
must first acknowledge that love for the poor and immigrant in distress is the
urgent requirement upon which our salvation depends. Only then can we
take up an urgent mission to a world increasingly mired in indifference to the
plight of the poor, the immigrant and the unborn. Indeed, we can credibly work
for social and political reform that favors the relegated, only if there is a
prior response to Christ present in them, as individuals, as families, as
fellow pilgrims on the way to a fuller life.
What constitutes justice in society is currently
in intellectual disarray. This is a fact, and says something about where the
reduced horizon of reasonable discourse has led us in a positivist,
voluntarist, and “leave it to the experts” post-modernity. This fact does not change the basic prerogatives of
human reason, or the truth of the natural law foundations of Catholic Social
Teaching. However, we do well to recall that when Pope John XIII taught in Mater
et Magistra and Paul VI in Humanae Vitae that the Church is the
authentic interpreter of the natural law, they were not saying that the truth
of this interpretation would be evidently persuasive to all reasonable persons.[xxi] The argument can be made, and there are those who will find it
convincing. But for a thousand different factors present in the individual
person, there are many who will not judge it so convincing. Faith does in fact,
purify and enlighten reason.[xxii] It is still reason, but we should not underestimate the amount of
purification needed for it to operate really well.
I mention because Pope Francis’ teaching on social cohesion and economic justice in Evangelii
Gaudium picks up an important theme already clarified in Pope Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate: both emphasize the primacy of evangelical charity as the gift that
makes justice possible in a broken world.[xxiii] This was already present in the Social Teaching of the Church, but it
is being elaborated more comprehensively in our time. Evangelical charity,
provoked by kerygmatic faith, is the context for our dialogue with the world
about social justice. In other words, evangelization—changing hearts to be bearers of charity—is the engine that makes a persevering effort on behalf of justice
possible, provides its essential content, and which offers hope that a
reasonable dialogue about what constitutes justice can be fruitfully engaged in
practical terms. The Gospel regenerates human relations by offering the grace
of relational transformation according to the mind of God in Christ Jesus the
Lord. We need to grapple with this when we advocate for social justice in
political contexts. Without evangelizing the culture, we will have limited
success in advocating for a more humane social policy, or in stemming the tide
of calls for radical redefinition of social institutions.
IV. THERE WAS A MAN ON HIS WAY TO JERICHO
It is good to note an obvious fact about the way
the Lord told parables. His narratives
always involve motion, and however simple or complex the parables may be, they
have an identifiable beginning, middle and end. The average person gets that. A
degree is not needed to enjoy a good story, and to learn something from it. The
Lord’s parables, though, usually involve a quick but
dramatic moment of decision. The prodigal son, coming to his senses, decides to
make the journey back to his Father’s house. The guests invited to the wedding make ill-fated decisions
not to attend, having discovered other, and more important things to do at that
moment. The man who finds a buried treasure decides to sell what he has so as
to buy the land wherein the treasure lies.
Saint Thomas in Honduras
When we talk about immigrants, we are talking
about people who make decisions that involve great risk and that involve
literal travel from one place to another. An immigrant’s life is much like that of the man in the story who decides to make
his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, despite the fact that he likely knew that he
might fall in with robbers. Both in the parables and in the lives of
immigrants, there are two sets of movements at work. Movements of judgment and
will, and movements across treks of land. They are analogous movements. The
former being cause of the latter; the latter being visible embodiment of the
former.
I would ask you at this point to note what I
consider the dominant tones in the stories I told you about both the young man
from Honduras, and the men and women living on the mountain-side outside
Guatemala City. They all spoke to me with a measured realism about their
situation. Each had an acute capacity for making life-changing decisions, and
each displayed a willingness to keep trying despite what most of us would call
unbearably difficult human circumstances. In short, they have accepted
sovereignty over their own destinies. All of them have seen death, and have
seen the tenuousness of life, yet, they have not succumbed to either fatalism,
paralysis, or to dishonorable means of promoting their own well-being or
happiness.
Saint Thomas, in the prologue to the Secunda
Pars, has something to say about this kind of personal sovereignty as he sets
the trajectory of his description of the human return to God:
Since, as the Damascene says, man is said to be
made to God’s image, in so far as the image implies an
intelligent being endowed with free-will and self-movement (per se
potestativum): now that we have treated of the exemplar, i.e. God, and of those
things which came forth from the power of God in accordance with His will; it
remains for us to treat of His image, i.e., man, inasmuch as he too is the
principle of his actions, as having free-will and control of his actions
(habens et suorum operum potestatem).[xxiv]
Whatever else may be said of medieval theological
paradigms, and of the theological anthropology of Saint Thomas in particular,
one thing is particularly clear, and to my mind beyond dispute. Saint Thomas,
and many of his contemporaries, proposed a robust and energetic theological
anthropology. Who are we? We are intelligent, endowed with free-will, capable
of self-movement and have dominion over our actions. Dante, on that hilltop at
the respite of his journey at the end of the Purgatorio, heard Virgil
tell him the very same thing:
Expect no more or word or sign from me;
Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,
And error were it not to do its bidding;
Thee o’er thyself I therefore crown and mitre![xxv]
There is a tendency for some voices in the ETA
West to react to the immigrant and the poor with a kind of condescendence.
Sometimes we spontaneously sermonize about how reckless these decisions are. At
times the condescension shows itself in a kind of attitude that blames this
recklessness on poor education or on pre-modern cultural perspectives on life.
Yet, the appropriate spontaneous response should begin with a sense of
amazement. We should be amazed that a 16 year old has the self-possession to
take responsibility for his life and try to cross the interior of Mexico in
hopes of finding something better, be it in Mexico, or in the United States, o donde
Diosito decida dirigir mis pasos. I know a lot of 16 year olds who struggle
to make a decision about whether to go to school in the morning. And there is
surely something remarkable about what those families on the hillside outside
of Guatemala City have had the audacity to try to do. They left their villages
in isolated parts of the country to try to find and create something better for
themselves and their children. Walker Percy would be amazed.
When we encounter the immigrant in our midst,
the first thing that we must see and acknowledge is the sovereignty and
self-possession of the person in front of us. They are not robots whose
reactions and judgments can be predicted infallibly by a computer model. They
have taken possession over their own lives. They move not simply because their
circumstances are no longer humanly bearable; they move because they are
intelligent beings endowed with free-will and self-movement. There is an
unspeakably great dignity in this expression of self-possession. The personal
encounter with the immigrant begins with a profound respect for the person who
has the wherewithal to make such decisions.
There is in this encounter between me, you and
the immigrant, something profound that we need to learn. Perhaps the
better term is remember. We need to remember what it can be like to risk
losing everything, even life, for the sake of a hope that there can be
something better. However reckless we may think it is for someone to start down
a road that starts in Honduras and will lead to only God knows where, that
there hope is strong enough to move them to act is for us in the ETA West,
something of a mirabile
visu, a wonder to behold.
Nature and Grace
Our return to God—which is the context for all moral theology-- is a self-moved return.
We are meant to have informed dominion over our own decisions and actions.
Thomas and Dante both, speaking for the whole of the theological tradition,
would have us know that these decisions and actions are meant by God to be
animated by a sense that God has loved us, and that the path to Him is
propelled by an eye open to perceiving where and how He might be loved in
return. Moral theology, the content of the Secunda Pars, is simply and only
about how to make the journey.
We want to live, we want to raise our families,
and we want to know the joy of human companionship. These are the very goods
both the 16 year old in Honduras spoke to us about, and the goods the families
living on the hillside outside Guatemala City were working for. All that is
inscribed in the natural law, and embodied in what we call the Common Good, is
a reflection of the deeper desire to know rest and communion and life with one
another and in God. It is vitally important that our people continue to
perceive these as the fundamental goods of life. I wonder sometimes if one of
the effects of unmoderated exposure to technological power and easy access to
constant images designed to over-stimulate the mind has caused in our ETA
culture an obfuscated perception of what the goods of nature really are. In
that sense, the immigrant and the poor hold up a mirror to us about what, in
fact, is most important in life. Maybe there are parts of our culture that
would prefer not to look into this mirror. But we in the Church must, because a
realist perception of what is good is the soil upon which the mustard
seed of the Kingdom grows and extends its branches to heaven.
What can an immigrant teach us? Well, to start
with, he or she can remind us about the
true goods of life, and he or she can remind us that seeking these goods, and
making excruciating decisions to attain them, is the work of a robust human
being. From the perspective of the faith, paralysis and the grey
pragmatism of daily life degenerating into small-mindedness is a far
worse condition than that of the mother and child waiting at the McAllen bus
station.
V.
A GOOD PLACE TO STOP
The Journey of the Mind
People, especially those of us familiar with the
world of the University, sometimes make the mistake of thinking that ordinary
people need to know lots of stuff in order to live a Christian life. Someone
might be thinking right now that perhaps I am suggesting that everybody read Tertia
Pars, question 46, and the prologue to the Secunda Pars so that we
can be all be energized as a Church. This is definitely not what I am
suggesting. We have it backwards if we think Thomas, or any theologian, is the
expert everybody needs to know about. If we think that we are substituting
Walker Percy’s scientific experts with our own theological
experts. Personal sovereignty would be lost either way. One of the proximate interests of my lecture
this afternoon has been to insist that theology is not to be identified
exclusively with the academic work of theologians. Theologians have theological
minds, but theirs is a labor that properly aims to promote the theological life
of all believers. When faith, hope and charity govern the thoughts and actions
of Christians, then the announcement of the Gospel is having its divinely
willed effect.[xxvi]
Formal theological work is about hearing and
thinking robustly about what the entirety of the Scriptural revelation says
about the Father’s salvific will in Christ, and how we can help
quicken the dynamic of grace in the lives of ordinary Christians. The fruit of
such work is a deeper appreciation of what life is like close to the
well-springs of grace. Thomas is a great and perennially relevant theologian
because he proposes a patterned description of what God already enacts in the
spontaneity of nature and grace operating in the lives of ordinary Christians.
He thereby helps the teacher teach well, and the preacher preach truly. What
people need to know, though, is how much God loves them, and how this is
manifested in Christ Crucified, and then how best to respond to Him. In short
what we all need is the Gospel preached to us.
Seeking the Forward Path
Pilgrims and the immigrant depend on God and the
people they meet on the road. They have nothing else. I hear a lot of young men
and women in the immigration detention centers I have visited use phrases like Dios
y la Virgen me estaban cuidando. I have heard 14 year old girls tell me
that it was through the kindness of a man she did not know, but whom God put in
her path, that a gang of youths outside a city in Mexico did not assault, rape
and kill her. And a third of the boys I confirmed in Detroit in the Mexican
neighborhoods, during my time as an auxiliary bishop there, chose the name
Toribio for their confirmation. Santo Toribio Romo has, by popular acclaim,
become the patron and protector of immigrants crossing from Mexico. The saint
has appeared to many, assisting them in small but decisive ways, often saving
their lives. Word spreads. People have faith. From the perspective of faith,
heaven is not so far from earth, and sometimes it is a lot closer than the
United States.
And yet, sometimes we in the Church in the ETA
West can smugly ask the immigrant Church to assimilate to the customs and
habits that are our own. We ought to pause before facilely insisting upon such
a demand. For in doing so, we may in some way be asking them to abandon a
Christ of flesh and blood for a gray pragmatism of indecisive small-mindedness.
Perhaps we have become too accustomed to our five story office buildings, our
myriads of forms to fill out, our recorded messages on phone lines and our
endless meetings to discuss whether we will actually do something. No, we must
take seriously what the Holy Father says when he urges us to let ourselves as a
Church be evangelized by those whom we are asked by God to receive hospitably.
The immigrant changes by being with us. The question is, are we willing to
change because we are with the immigrant?
This change can happen when we humbly recover
the evangelical primacy of the personal encounter with the person who walks
along our path, be they on a mountainside in Guatemala, or seated at a bus
station while we are driving by, or waiting in a detention center. This is what it means to be evangelized by
the poor. Any of these would be good places for you and me to stop, listen, see
and respond. We might learn something by lingering in such places. And if we
ask for it, we might be given the grace that opens up for us the path of
life, a path we might otherwise never have the courage to take.
Thank you for your patience, and your kind
attention.
+df
[i] I will try again, for sure. Here there is nothing.
There is no work, I have no family, and if you do not want to smuggle drugs,
they kill you. I would like to go to the United States, but if I can’t
get there, I’ll stay in Mexico, at least
there, there is work, life with other people around. You know, there is life
there. What do you want to do in the United States? I would like to have
a family, a little house, live a good life.
[ii] We have come from various parts of the country. What we
have in common is the desire to leave places where there are no hopes to be
able to maintain a family and educate the children. Here we have struggled, but
we have gotten some work. Also, we fight together for the good of the children.
We have hopes to build up something better. And the young people here want
to go to the United States? We have not seen a single one leave for the
United States. Sometimes the younger ones think about it, but we tell them it
is dangerous to try to go there. And besides, here we are building something
beautiful.
[iii]Walker
Percy, Diagnosing the Modern Malaise, in Signposts in a Strange Land,
204-221, (Picador USA, 1991: New York), 210.
[iv]
Diagnosing the Modern Malaise, 211.
[v] Diagnosing the
Modern Malaise, 211.
[vi]
Diagnosing the Modern Malaise, 210.
[vii]
See,
for example the Regensburg Address, given October 12, 2006. See also the
earlier essay Contemporary Man Facing the Question of God, found in Dogma
and Preaching, Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, (Ignatius, 2011:
San Francisco) 77-87.
[viii]
Diagnosing the Modern Malaise, 214.
[ix]
Evangelii Gaudium, no. 83. Within the citation, the
quote about “gray pragmatism”
is
taken from Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to Presidents of Latin
American Episcopal Commissions for the Doctrine of the Faith, Guadalajara,
Mexico, 1996.
[x] Evangelii Gaudium, no 64.
[xi] El Espejo Enterrado, pp. 227-241. From the defeat of the Spanish Armada
in 1588 to the long economic and political decline that led to the loss to the
French at Rocroi in 1643.The novels of Arturo Perez-Reverte in the Capitan
Alatriste series are a remarkable window into the economic and political
decline of the Spanish Empire.
[xii]Mario Vargas Llosa, La Guerra
del fin del mundo, (Alfaguara, 2006: México)
[xiii] Evangelii Gaudium, no 198.
[xiv] Evangelii Gaudium, no 178.
[xv] III, 46, 3, c.: […] Primo enim, per hoc homo cognoscit quantum Deus
hominem diligat, et per hoc provocatur ad eum diligendum, in quo perfectio
humanae salutis consistit. Unde apostolus dicit, Rom. V, commendat
suam caritatem Deus in nobis, quoniam, cum inimici essemus, Christus pro nobis
mortuus est. [...]. The text of the Summa Theologiae I cite is from Biblioteca
de autores cristianos edition, (Madrid, 1978). For better or for worse, the
translations into English are my own.
[xvi]
Ad Romanos, cap. 5, lect. 2; Marietti no. 396.: [...] Rarum enim est
propter hoc quod est maximum, ut enim dicitur Io. XV, 13: maiorem hac
dilectionem nemo habet, et cetera. Illud autem quod Christus fecit, ut quis
moriatur pro impiis et iniustis, nunquam invenitur. Et ideo merito admirandum
est, quare Christus hoc fecerit.
[xvii]
Ad Romanos, cap. 5, lect. 1; Marietti no. 392.: [...] Spiritum enim
sanctum, qui est amor patris et filii, dari nobis, est nos adduci ad
participationem amoris, qui est spiritus sanctus, a qua quidem participatione
efficimur Dei amatores.
[xviii] Ad Galatas, cap. 6, Lect. 4; Marietti
no. 374.: [...] Fides ergo charitate formata est nova creatura. Creati namque
et producti sumus in esse naturae per Adam; sed illa quidem creatura vetusta
iam erat, et inveterata, et ideo dominus producens nos, et constituens in esse
gratiae, fecit quamdam novam creaturam. Iac. I, 18: ut simus initium aliquod creaturae eius. Et dicitur nova, quia per eam renovamur in
vitam novam; et per spiritum sanctum, Ps. CIII, 30: emitte spiritum tuum, et
creabuntur, et renovabis faciem terrae. Et per crucem Christi, II
Cor. V, 17: si qua est in Christo nova creatura, et cetera. Sic ergo per novam creaturam, scilicet per fidem
Christi et charitatem Dei, quae diffusa est in cordibus nostris, renovamur, et Christo coniungimur.
[xix] See II-II, 24, 8, c., for how charity is commensurate to
the knowledge of faith, and perfected in the knowledge of the blessed.
[xx]
My language here is indebted to my reading of Charles Taylor (A Secular Age).
My sense that what I suggest is accurate is indebted to living in the age
Taylor describes.
[xxi]
See Mater et Magistra, nos 42 and 26, and Humanae Vitae, no 4.. In
fact there is an analogy here between the teaching of Vatican I on how reason
alone can attain to the knowledge of the existence of God, and the teaching of
the social magisterium about how the natural law is knowable in its
applicability to human familial and social questions. See Summa
Theologiae I, 1, 1.
[xxii] See Deus caritas est, no 28.
[xxiii] Caritas in veritate, nos
10-20. See also Deus caritas est, nos 26-29. See Evangelii Gaudium,
Ch. 4.
[xxiv]
Prologue to the Secunda Pars: Quia, sicut Damascenus dicit, homo factus
ad imaginem Dei dicitur, secundum quod per imaginem significatur intellectual
et arbitrio liberum et per se potestativum; postquam praedictum est de
exemplari, scilicet de Deo, et de his quae processerunt ex divina potestate
secundum eius voluntatem, restat ut consideremus de eius imagine, idest de
homine, secundum quod et ipse est suorum operum principium, quasi liberum
arbitrium habens et suorum operum potestatem.
[xxv]Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio, Canto
XXVII. I have used H.W. Longfellow’s
translation.
[xxvi]
Or,
put another way, the theological life is the life lived in active relation to
the persons of the Trinity. The Cappadocian Fathers spoke this way. See Romanus
Cessario, OP, Christian Faith and the Theological Life, (Catholic
University Press, 1996: Washington D.C.) for a very fine treatment of this
topic.
