Immigration as a Theological Paradigm (February 2015)

Immigration as a Theological Paradigm

(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 insecure Stewards, 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 buses 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? [I asked]: 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. Pope Francis, writing 30 years after Walker Percy, 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 he describes this cultural affliction 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, though, that 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 thousands who decide over time to embark on a dangerous journey from Honduras to McAllen, Texas, and beyond?

Western culture is not just present in the economically and technologically advanced cultures we in the US experience, taken as a whole 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 person, 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 principally 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 condescension. 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 rememberwhat 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 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.