Words and Things

I gave this talk to students at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, in February, 2024, as part of a seminar series Dr John Cavadini had organized to help celebrate the Eucharistic Year in the United States.

Hunger, Poverty and the Eucharist

(Reflections as from different mirrors)

+Daniel E. Flores, STD

Bishop of Brownsville

The question. What to give to the person who has everything? This is something sometimes asked in jest.

The Queen of Sheba may have wondered that when she was preparing to leave Solomon’s Jerusalem.

Had she visited him again later she might have better gifted him a slap across the face with the question: What are you thinking ?

He had grown weak of mind, dizzied by his success, influenced by the flatteries of his courtiers and wives, and the gods of the nations he permitted to be propagated in his kingdom.

Poverty is a reality of the human condition with as many faces as there are vulnerable conditions. Solomon was more vulnerable than he knew. And, we could say, the not knowing how poor he was was his greatest poverty, his greatest vulnerability.

The precariousness of our vulnerabilities is a given in human life. We don’t like it; we would prefer not to think about it, and we would like to overcome it. Yet, we teeter about like a little boat on the Sea of Galilee, trying not to think about the storm that might appear on the horizon. Until it does.

Perhaps the better question: What to give to the person who thinks he has everything?

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In the mission of Jesus the gift is crafted to suit the need.

It’s gratuity is pristine and childlike,

yet its arrow is deliberately poised to strike what we didn’t even know we were missing.

The Incarnation itself is the gift most suitable.

The Lord’s public ministry is a pedagogy of deeds and words that when combined form signs of things God would have us learn to hunger for.

The pedagogy of desire is the moving dynamic of the Kingdom.

We are taught what to hope for, and how to attain it.

Not everyone who approached Jesus came seeking the forgiveness of their sins.

The paralyzed man lowered from the rooftop didn’t say anything;

his action and that of the friends who lowered him were expressing an unspoken ache for healing (Mk 2, 1-12).

Jesus spoke and acted;

first he forgave the man his sins,

and then told him to get up and walk.

A sign of who he was and what he came to do.

A sign also that engendered opposition.

John’s disciples were sent to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

Jesus responds: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” (See Lk 7,18 ff; Is 61, 1 ff)

The crowds hear about these things, and they want to go see him.

“Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear” (Mt 13,16).

A kind of hunger, primal almost, to be near where his goodness is.

The crowds sensed the particular character of his goodness;

it was the overflowing of generosity from his person,

And the selflessness of his accessibility.

The cynicism of those days was not so different from our own: “what’s in it for him? What’s the game here?”

In that springtime of his passing by, many perceived: “No game here.”

There was just the gift.

Goodness attracts, even though the attracted are not always so good.

There is both abundance and pedagogy in Jesus’s generosity.

There is a feeding and a progressive teaching of what to hunger for.

Poverty of spirit, purity of heart, meekness, and justice.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness [justice] for they will be satisfied.

A hunger for a right relation to God and neighbor.

A hunger for communion amongst the children of Adam.

In the face of a famished crowd, and helpless disciples, he tells them: “give them some food yourselves“ (Mk 6,37).

A hunger in Christ to have us hunger to feed the weary.

There are so many hungers.

A hunger for forgiveness of sins, and a hunger for being able to forgive.

A hunger for every word that comes from the mouth of God,

and a hunger for a true enfleshment of the words spoken.

A hunger for a pure act of generous love given,

A hunger for a true act of generous love received,

A hunger for a pure act of generous love given in return.

Catholicism is the religion of the response to the gift; of the graced arrow that hits the mark to generate a grace that returns the gift.

Salvation is in the response. Faith operates through love (Gal 5,6);we move in response to the love given, or we, and our faith, are still dead.

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Nicodemus seems to have been a well situated individual. He asked questions; Jesus gave him time and responses, both generously suited to his need. What he lacked was an initial openness of mind to how the Spirit of God could work in bringing about a new birth in us.

There is a gift of the Spirit to the mind, opening it to what the Spirit can do.

Nicodemus learned, arduously, to hunger for this gift.

There is the vulnerability of not knowing what it is most vital to know.

Jesus would have us know what we do not know we need to know.

Augustine points out (Tractate 69 on John) that it is possible for a Christian not to know what he or she really does know.

As when Jesus tells the disciples in John 14, 4-5: And you know where I am going, and you know the way. To this Thomas says: Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?

Jesus then says: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So, as Augustine points out, they did know the way, because they knew him, they just didn’t know they knew. Jesus had to tell them.

So it is with us, we know him in the Eucharistic mystery.

But, it is possible not to know him, in this mystery, precisely as the Way for us to the Truth and the Life.

We have to let him tells us how we move along towards the Father through this Eucharistic Way.

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From the novel by Javier Sicilia, “La Confesión”(DEBOLSILLO 2016). (Translation mine).

A poor priest talks to his Cardinal Archbishop aboutthepoor Christ on how the vulnerable Word addresses power.

«Do you know what amazes me about the incarnation? —I continued—, that it is the complete opposite of the modern world: the presence of the infinite within the limits of the flesh, and the fight, the relentless fight, against the temptations of the devil’s excesses. You don’t know how much I have meditated on the temptations of the desert. «‘Assume the power,’ the devil told him; that power that gives the illusion of disrupting and dominating everything. But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard. Our epoch, however, under the face of an enormous kindness, has succumbed to these temptations. ‘They will be like gods, they will change stones into loaves, they will dominate the world’… to this we have handed over the Christ and we do not even realize it.»

To this we have handed over the Christ; to this we have also handed over the poor:

An unrivaled pursuit to overcome the limits of our flesh;

to overcome our poor, fragile, time limited particularity;

as if this overcoming were the Kingdom on the eschatological horizon.

The illusion of invulnerability, and its twin ambition, self-sufficiency, is proposed as the principal aim of the epoch;

it has its own pedagogy of word and act, designed to instill and stir desire for limitlessness.

This pedagogy says “repeat after me”:

I want what I need so as not to need anything.

I have a right to get what I need…

And you have a right to try.

But, you have no right to expect me to help you.

Woe to you if you get in my way.

We have a hunger for it.

“But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard”, … as Javier Sicilia puts it.

Our flesh is the sign and source of our vulnerability, our limitations, our poverty. We have one, time bound life. What shall we do with it?

Christ Jesus, the WORD made flesh, had one time-bound life among us;

his limited flesh, his poverty.

From the Cross he needed someone to give him a drink.

His insufficiency. What did he do with it?

He embraced the limit; not as a curse, but as the path of his gift to us.

He gave it up for us,

offered it to the Father as a gift of love,

—One of us offering what we could not—

rose from the dead still bearing the marks of his wounds.

And he gives us his flesh to eat.

And in his risen body, he breathes the Spirit into us,

That we might be able to join him in the offering.

It is striking that the Risen Christ reveals himself to the Eleven through the signs of his wounds.

That is to say, through the glorified wounds themselves, or through the act of breaking the Bread. To my mind these are roughly equivalent signs.

The wounds speak of the vulnerable One.

And the bread-breaking is a sign of, well, breakability.

Pius XII talks about this in Mediator Dei; so do the Didache and Justin Martyr in the Apology. This is ubiquitous in the Tradition. He is recognized in the sign and act of the Sacrifice.

The Risen Christ desires to be recognizable and recognized under the sign of his vulnerability handed over for our sakes.

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Words and Signs.

Jerome translated the Gk mysterion into Latinusing either mysterium or sacramentum. (It’s not always clear what his criteria were.)

The Liturgy does this also: where in English we say “the Mystery of Faith”, translating mysterium fidei, the Spanish missal translates: el sacramento de nuestra fe.

Jesus is present in mysterium, that is to say, in the sacramentum.

This is instructive. We tend to think of a mystery as a dark cloud, and hiding things deep inside, which it is;

and we tend to think of a sacramentum as a visible sign, which it is;

but each one is a translation of the same New Testament word.

Each one is the other.

A darkly bright cloud, yes, but one that visibly signifies;

a visible sign, yes, but one that hides more than it shows, like the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites by day.

The mysterium signifies; it shows us some we can understand.

But it is also a cloud we must enter.

In the form of an action that offers his poverty: Take this, all of you,..

His vulnerable life, as a sacrifice of love to the Father, for the sake of his poor, vulnerable little flock.

One solitary vulnerable life, so poor, so hard, so miserable.

The mysterium / sacramentum of the Eucharist is an act that re-presents to us something the Someone of the Son does: it is presence and action; action of perduring gift.

To make us rich, as St Paul says (2 Cor 8,9).

But rich in what sense? In what way?

How are we to understand this?

How can we enter into it?

Rich by sharing in the wealth of his poverty,

now revealed as the glory of the Kingdom in all its dispossessed fullness.

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At the Savior’s command, and Formed by divine teaching

The traditional placement of the Lord’s Prayer after the Great Amen and before the elevation of the Lamb of God leading to Communion is enormously significant.

It is the formative prayer expressing compactly the desires of the Kingdom, and the desires of the Church at this moment.

The response of the Father to these simple petitions is Communion with Him through the gift of the Son,

the Lamb once slain who dies no more, the food of the new life, in the Holy Spirit.

The food of the journey, the Way.

Thy Kingdom Come would seem, then, to be the primary posture of a Christian poised to receive Communion.

That would be the Kingdom

where the blind and the lame are invited,

where the law is for the sake of man,

and not man for the sake of the law;

where mercy flows generously like the wine at a wedding;

where the widow and the orphan are not exploited,

and Lazarus at the door of the rich man is hungry no more.

You have to want to be at that kind of banquet.

Not wanting to is part of our poverty, that neediness that we do not know we have.

We can be so trapped in our self-made frozen lakes.

Mt 25, 31 ff. “For I was hungry and you gave me food,..”

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If there were no Matthew 25, 31: where would we be?

We would be without a vivid expression of how Jesus understood himself in the figure of the Son of Man:

The Son of Man, head of the human race, present in each member.

He who chose to share in our flesh, makes us common sharers in his.

There is no turning away from another that is not a turning away from him.

“You did it for me; or not”.

We would be without an explicit link between “this is my body” and the bodies of every member of the human race:

The vulnerable bodies, our woundable, limited, poor, miserable flesh bodies. Our common poverty. This is our great connection to Him and to each other.

We would be without the parabolic crescendo to the prophetic tradition defending the unjustly oppressed, the widow and the orphan,

The defenseless who are without resource to hold in check the manipulations of those who have the power to do so.

Head of the human race; he is in us and we in him, even in what by shorthand we call the natural order.

All the more so in the order of grace, where his headship is recognized and acclaimed.

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Behold the Lamb of God

In the Apocalypse, and in the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Christ is envisioned as the the Lamb who was slain, but who dies no more.

The triumphant vulnerable,..

The way of Christ is not the way of putting all our energy into a provisional invulnerability.

The self-preoccupation is slowly killing us.

There is a turn here: we stop focusing on procuring our own invulnerability so as to offer some relief to the vulnerable around us.

In Christ the Communion of the vulnerable makes us a people who strive to supply to the other what they may lack, as they supply what we may lack.

Opening us to the truth that our incompleteness, our congenital lack of self-sufficiency, is not a curse but a blessing,

that invites relation and communion.

And the possibility of love.

In the Eucharist we learn that we cannot feed ourselves with what we most need.

It has to be freely given by another.

What we most need is a love that hungers to feed another.

This is the love he feeds us with.

It breaks tbeough.

“Why, you’re one of my little ones,” she said, as she reached out to touch the Misfit. Right before he shot her. (My translation of Flannery O,Connor.)

By his poverty we were made rich.

Rich with what?

As I have done so you must do,..

A generosity that gives outside of ourselves,

That clothes the naked because we have been clothed with the baptismal garment

That feeds the hungry because we have been fed by his sacrificial Eucharistic act

That welcomes a stranger because we were once strangers and have been made members of the household of God.

That visits the prisoner because we were prisoners once, and have been set free.

By this is the Father glorified.

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A practical consequence

Reality is supposed to look different on the other side of the Sacrifice,

On the other side of the dying and rising of Jesus.

Our vision of what is, informed by the light of what has been done for us, given to us, handed over for us, fed to us, breathed into us.

Love acts, or it is not love.

In Christ there is no love of the Father that prescinds from the flesh and blood condition of the neighbor.

When we walk out of Mass is there something we can do, or make plans to do?

I do not ask the “to do” question out of my American proclivity to always seek measurable results,

but rather from a Gospel insistence that love and justice must touch flesh and blood, or they are just words we have emptied of content.

There is a further opportunity to meet Christ in the flesh and blood encounter with the suffering of another.

The Eucharistic encounter summed up in “This is my body given up for you” envelops the entire dramatic unfolding of the Liturgy;

it is mirrored in the outgoing search for some manifestation of “the least of mine, for they are me”.

There should be a hunger to find him in our midst;

on this campus we inhabit, this city and neighborhood. In a soup kitchen, a refugee center, a juvenile detention facility, a prison cell, in a nursing home or hospice center.

The point is that the searching is something that he initiates in us, so that he can be found by us.

Better not to go alone. He tended to send out in pairs, and the Church better expresses herself when the practical encounters are communal. We are not lone rangers.

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The mysticism of the Christ glimpsed

The hunger and thirst for justice is not different than a hunger to go to Christ in his humiliated and broken condition.

This is like the hard mysticism of Dorothy Day.

Mary Magdalene searched for him, his corpsed body; she was found by a Gardener. The words she uses are meant to remind of us the Song of Songs

«Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.» (Jn 20,15)

“The watchmen came upon me as they made their rounds of the city:
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?”(Song of Songs, 3,3)

Recognition is the sweetest grace of the New Testament:

Jesus said to her, «Mary!» She turned and said to him in Hebrew, «Rabbouni,» which means Teacher.

This ardent desire for a glimpse of Christ in the flesh is a Eucharistic consequence, a Eucharistic desire.

But it seems a decision of his inscrutable goodness to us that we look for him marred, bloodied, rejected, hungry, imprisoned Alzheimered, drug addicted, ..

Out of his generosity, he insists we learn to see and serve him there, to embrace the leper as St Francis did,

We have to see him there before our eyes can see the Christ that the baroque masters tried to capture in his risen glory.

The Eucharistic sacramentum is a broken host, and a wounded side filling an overflowing chalice.

The Eucharistic mysterium is a making sturdy the heart to go to the difficult places, the places that offer a glimpse of Christ; so poor, so thirsty, so miserable, so hard.

A consolation not a comfort.

It is a love suited to our circumstance.

For stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. (Song of Songs 8, 6).

Christ hidden, Christ loved and searched for is the only suitable way to get us out of our pervasive self-preoccupation,

and onto a road like the one to Emmaus that allows him to join our company, and show himself.

If we cannot empty ourselves in some way, we are not really receiving the sacramentum we are consuming.

We are worse than lost in the cosmos.

So pervasive are our webs of self-concern, that to leave them is like slowly waking up from a dream or a deep sleep.

It is a kind of rising from the dead.

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Thank you for your kind attention.

+df

It was Dr Greg Hillis who in 2016 asked me to give the Fr Vernon Robertson Lecture, at Bellarmine University. Greg very much wanted me to address the topic of immigration, and I was happy to do so.

I traveled to Ballarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, on 28 March, 2017, to give a lecture entitled “The Politics of Human Dignity: Catholics and Immigration” .

While I was in Louisville, Greg showed me the University, took me to visit Gethsemani Abbey. He delighted in showing me around, introducing me to the monks and sharing with me the stories about Thomas Merton’s hermitage on the grounds of the Abbey. We communicated regularly thereafter. Greg passed away in 2024 after a heroic battle against cancer. I reflect often on the generous time and hospitality he gave to me on my visit. And I am grateful to God for his example as a theologian and “man of the Church” (to use de Lubac’s phrase). May he rest in peace.

Here below is the text of the lecture I gave on the occasion of that 2017 visit. I think it remains relevant to our current situation.

+dflores

The Politics of Human Dignity: Catholics and Immigration (2017)

The topic of this lecture is Catholics and the issue of immigration. I view this lecture as mostly addressed to how Catholics can properly grapple with this issue. Catholics have a responsibility to enter into the discussion about immigration in a serious way, and we have a decisive mission to sanctify the discourse that permeates the political process. My lecture today, though, in no way takes for granted that most Catholics are in fact engaged in the discussion, as Catholics. That is to say as equipped to purify, elevate and thus sanctify the situation we face. I rather think many are not. We have far to go. Yet it seems to me Bellarmine University is a good place to lend a bit of shoulder to the effort.

I begin, though, with a verse written by the 20th Century Spanish essayist and poet Miguel de Unamuno who gave to us a poetic meditation on Christ Crucified, emerging from his contemplation of the Crucified painted by the 16th Century artist Diego Velázquez. The poet converses with the artist and his work, exemplifying thereby a rich dialogical tradition of image and word. The translation, for better or for worse, is my own:

While the earth in loneliness sleeps,

there watches the white moon; the Man watches

from his Cross, while men sleep;

watches now the man without blood, the Man white

like the moon of the black night;

watches now the Man that gave all his blood

that the peoples might know that they are men. (1)

A Catholic must begin with hope which for us can only emerge from our contemplation of the One who watches in the night. For us politics can only really be about keeping faith with Him, and what he shows us about God, about ourselves and about our neighbor. For He comes, “that the peoples might know that they are men”.

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I am not primarily interested in talking about the current state of political discourse in the United States. I will, however, have to do so in order to clarify in some way how a Catholic moral and political perspective differs from the current dominant way of talking about this issue. So, I will spend a few lines on a description of the current political and moral universe Catholics inhabit.

The state of public discourse about immigration and immigrants is an exemplary case of a poverty that exists within our culture. By poverty I mean that the culture seems to lack the resources needed to engage in significant moral discourse on issues that impact the social order. We churn like a perpetually stationary hurricane sitting in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Immigration is not the only exemplary case, there are others. Still, it is the one I want to address today.

We are mired in a poverty of moral discourse that manifests itself principally as an perpetual battle of narratives. And this happens in two ways: first the narratives are presented more or less syllogistically, and second, the place of sentiment and emotion in the narrative is used to bolster the persuasive intent of the narrative. Classically, persuasion is aimed at the will, though in modern political discourse this is so only confusedly. The discourse is not primarily aimed at the will as the agent of rational judgment about what is best to do about immigration, but rather at the will insofar as it can be moved by sentiment to accept a narrative syllogism, from which follows a position on immigration. The narratives in themselves are problematic inasmuch as they are mutually exclusive, but what is more corrosive is the manner in which the narratives are evaluated.

The first problem here is the widespread belief that the battle is won by those who are perceived to have the most relevant facts on their side. And despite the fact that these facts are passionately and often angrily listed, all sides in the debate seem to accept as given that facts are facts and that their moral import follows as an evident conclusion upon the narration of them.

The role of the emotions in this dynamic is inordinate precisely because they are asked to bear the decisive weight. Since the syllogistic narratives evidently fail to persuade a majority one way or the other, as a practical matter, the extra push to political judgment is supplied by appeal to emotion and sentiment. Each side will ascribe to itself the appropriate sentiment motivating its own narrative of the facts. Proper love of country, respect for law and order, sympathy for national sovereignty are principally appealed to, while conversely, on the other side, the appeal is to global solidarity, concern for the poor, and compassion for the suffering of others.

These descriptions are usually coupled with a twin argument about the faulty sentiments of those in opposition. So the argument becomes one between sides that claim the moral evaluation of the other is faulty because of its corrosive relation to an inappropriate sentiment. Thus, for example, those sincerely in favor of a more humane immigration policy in this country often narrate the relevant facts and then discuss how the facts of those opposed are corrupted by anger, racism, hyper-nationalism etc. On the other side, those in favor of a stricter immigration policy, of walls and even mass deportations, list the facts relevant to them, and then charge the other side with an anemic love of country, of heartlessness in the face of crimes committed by immigrants, or of exaggerated sentiments of compassion for persons that this country is not able to help.

Thus, I suggest that the factual presentation is a competitive one, presented as exclusive of the other; the emotional narrative is also mostly a competitive one, exclusive of the other. To close the description here, the opposing sides tend to view each other’s facts and sentiments dismissively, and as irrelevant. Charges of irrelevancy further impoverish the discussion.

What is lacking in the discourse I have only briefly and generally described is a proper estimation of what constitutes a moral and political judgment. We never move to the discussion of how to integrate and prioritize the legitimate goods variously identified by both sides. Nor do we acknowledge that affections, despite their immediacy, are not beyond the need for purification. Without these steps, there is no real political judgment. This kind of atrophied discourse is a kind of poverty and paralysis in our culture, and not one that we need accept with resignation. Perhaps, as Thomas Pfau suggests in a very fine book called “Minding the Modern” the very concept of judgment as something involving a reasonable dialogical engagement with various goods and affections has slipped from our practical public awareness. (2) I will say more about this further step needed, in course.

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At this juncture, I would like to place on the table a few words about the broader Catholic moral imagination. An aspect of our contemporary Catholic culture is the increasing difficulty we have picturing how providence manifests itself. I do not mean giving a theological account of God’s governance, I mean shedding a little light on how everyday Catholics live and pray it. God’s governance in history expresses itself primarily through human agency. This is for a Catholic something so deep in our theological tradition and in our habitual awareness that in a memory-blocked age we can forget where it comes from.

I had it taught to me by my Grandmother, who used to rise early in the morning to pray several Rosaries. And when I would ask her what she prayed for, she would tell me that she prayed for all her grandchildren, especially the ones far away. She said simply that she prayed that if ever they are in trouble, God would put a kind and generous soul in their path to help them. She was a realist, that is to say, she knew her grandchildren, my older cousins, were quite capable of finding all sorts of trouble. But she was a woman of faith, and trusted to God that He would find ways to help them. Mostly, that meant He would put the right people in their path. The mirror image of that kind of perception, available to anyone with faith and a little imagination, is that we are also all potential answers to some grandmother’s prayer in some place far away. Indeed, the generosity God inspires in each one of us today is his answer to someone’s prayer. 

This imaginative perception communicated to me by my grandmother is an echo of the lived transmission of the faith, and of many a hagiographical account. Perhaps most famously in the tradition is the account of Saint Francis and his encounter with the Leper. Surely the Leper prayed for a touch of human compassion, and surely God inspired something in Francis to respond in the way he did. (3) But Francis also prayed to know Christ most intimately, and in the Leper found Christ waiting. This awareness is present also in the stories told today among immigrants of the mysterious figure of Santo Toribio Romo, who is said to emerge from the desert to assist an immigrant who has lost his way and is in danger of perishing.

The daily perceptions of providence exist principally within the ethos of charity; that is to say, within an imaginative vision of life that sees cohesion in the grace God gives to a generous human heart, and the care for those who are in trouble. Even in a wounded world, people find themselves crossing paths with someone who will not abandon them to disaster. The parable of the Good Samaritan is prototypical of this perspective maintained in faith.

One could imagine the Father of the prodigal son praying in the way my Grandmother described, asking that someone be placed in his son’s life to render him aid in the moment of need. It is doubtful that the older brother bothered to pray this way, and indeed, the older brother’s unwillingness to go seek his younger brother is one of the “indictments by absence” present in the parable. I say this because a Christological reading of the parable takes note of how it begs for the sending of the “first born” to the aid of the younger sibling.

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Unamuno on Christ the reckoning rod and carpenter’s square:

You are the Man, the Reason, the Norm,

your cross is our reckoning rod, the measure

of the pain that elevates, and the carpenter’s square

of our rectitude: it makes straight

the heart of man when bowed low.

You have humanized the universe, O Christ.

«Behold the Man!» through whom God becomes something. (4)

I actually think most Catholics still perceive to some degree this mysterious dynamic linking human responses to divine governance. What is lacking, however, is a bridge between this manner of perceiving life and Catholic participation in contemporary discussions about a just social order. We are not sufficiently aware of the absence of this bridge, nor have we examined how it might be built. In this sense, I read the following passage from Pope Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate as a plea for the building of this bridge:

«The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more effectively we love them. Every Christian is called to practice this charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he wields in the pólis. This is the institutional path — we might also call it the political path — of charity, no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly, outside the institutional mediation of the pólis.» (5)

The political world Catholics inhabit seems to have no room for this kind of perspective. I do not mean simply a perspective that includes grace as a vehicle of human participation in the providence of a Good God, or a perspective that has room for the appearance of the miraculous in history; rather more to the point, I mean that the political discourse does not take sufficient account of human agency as intimately involved in the sustenance of human and social cohesion. Charity has been privatized, and as a result, our pursuit of adequately just solutions to contingent social circumstances has become truncated. Further, moral judgment, as an act of prudential reason, has also been privatized, and this has impact on the character of political judgment in the wider public sphere.

Part of the problem is that individual’s relations to the world outside are increasingly difficult to account for, apart from willing them. Our wider culture has no basis to talk about mutual concern and compassion apart from the language of purely willed associations. (6) These willed associations resolve to the isolated individual who tends to view relations suspiciously. When social relations are conceived as fundamentally voluntary, they are subject to severance for whatever provocation an encounter might unpleasantly cause. The “I do not want to deal with you” that is an ever present temptation to fallen nature becomes a normative and politically acceptable response.

Catholic moral teaching, including the Social Justice magisterium, presumes a metaphysics of human nature in relation, and proposes a healing and strengthening of these relations by faith, hope, and charity. The Church stubbornly insists that human political judgment cannot prescind from a metaphysically prior existential relatedness. When there is no intellectual respect within public discourse for the given of human relatedness, we end up with what Pope Francis calls the culture of indifference. Indifference perceives no moral claim based on relation, and it kills by neglect. In the Church’s life this breakdown of presumed relationality prior to willing it is reflected in the privatization of charity, its reduction from a robust gift of social cohesion to an individually willed act of selflessness. There is not much urgency to it, certainly not like in the parable of the Good Samaritan. There is only me, wanting to help.

The eclipse of human relationality as a fundamental given of politics and law is the legacy of a post-Kantian search for an expression of law that serves as a kind of imperative derived a priori and applied universally. The tragedy of our age is that the a priori universal that seems to govern our moral/political discourse is that of individual autonomy and the radical freedom of the will. Limitation of freedom by secondary laws is permitted only in so far as the freedom is perceived to cause injury to another. At present the “perception of injury” that society permits to be legally prohibited capriciously excludes vast swaths of the population from the unborn to the comatose patent, with the poor and the immigrant standing temporally somewhere in between.

In our current social predicament law is conceived as primarily a matter of discerning how to avoid the evils that unrestrained relationality might cause to the good of national sovereignty, community safety and personal rights. This state of affairs is precisely the result of the dropping out of our political consciousness a sense of legally expressed positive norms that govern the prior good of human relationality. Law as aimed at promoting the good ordering of relations, so that goods can be achieved by individuals and families within a community, seems to have passed out of our perception of social order.

We seem also to have lost the public and habitual ability to derive principles and then discern their applicability within contingent historical circumstances. Politics, and by extension, law, is increasingly perceived as ahistorical. This is to say, the principles, or facts, once assembled, are treated as universal imperatives that admit of no adaptation to particular historical circumstances. The law is the law. If we seem to be facing a choice between extremes, between high border walls on one side and open borders on another, it is because the discourse does not have room for integrating principles. Only in a political universe where law is conceived as essentially a collection of universal norms that are prohibitive of evil—evil understood minimally as causing obvious injury to another– and not also aimed at promoting the good of human relationality, is this poverty possible.

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Catholic moral life and thought is essentially integrative, that is to say, it assembles relevant aspects of a human situation and in so doing begins the work of forming an evaluative judgment about how particular situations do or do not attain to the more universal human goods like life, family and work. The move to the particular application is a move of practical reason that assesses goods and circumstances in a prioritized way. This way of thinking and speaking is essentially dialogical and integrative. It flows from a tradition of moral discourse that finds exemplary, though not exclusive, expression in Saint Thomas. The move from the reality of historical humanity, to the consideration of prioritized universal human goods, and then a renewed consideration of how to support these goods among particular peoples and historical circumstances is the social analogue to the Thomistic return to the phantasm. (7) Such dialogical movement is a necessary and always needed verification of rational adequatio ad rem socialem. The move from the particular to the universal back to the particular again is basic in Catholic social teaching.

People do this kind of reasoning all the time; you do not need a degree in philosophy or theology to have a habitual sense of this. Health is a human good, so we try to eat healthy foods and get some exercise and enough sleep. But if our child is sick and we have to drop everything to take her to the hospital, and stay up at night with her, and eat peanut butter and jelly because there is nothing else available, at least until she gets better, then we are spontaneously re-ordering our principled priorities. This kind of thinking is not outside of our experience, but together with charity it has been privatized. There is little concourse between the moral reasoning of individuals and the moral discourse of the political order.

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The papacy in contemporary times, from Pope Pius XII to Pope Francis, has spoken with increasing urgency about the phenomenon of human migration, and what a Christian and politically responsible response looks like. The development of the Magisterium on this issue has been largely a matter of expressing how a theological anthropology rooted in the Scriptural tradition lived in the Church and interpretive of the natural law impacts the social order as it develops and changes. This responds to a recognition that the primordial goods of human life, family and social cohesion have been radically affected by the development of the modern nation-state and the emergence of post-modern global economic structures. The papal magisterium thus expresses principles, and then asks that the principles be applied in a practical way to the particular, and often shifting conditions on the ground.

How immigration policy is formulated in the United States is an example of the move to particular application of principles. How a particular border patrol agent applies the policy when interviewing a 14 year old apprehended at the Rio Grande River is the move to the most particular. It is at these more particular levels, though, that the Church is often told she has no relevance to the conversation. Often our own people do not know what to make of what bishops say about the application of principles to the issue of immigration.

It is important that we understand, however, that if the Church as teacher, and if Catholics in general, cannot engage actively in the articulation of norms that require careful prudential application in law and in practice, then we are, de facto, limiting ourselves to the poverty of the post-Kantian search for ahistorical universal norms I spoke about earlier. The Church does teach norms that admit of no exceptions, but the culture suffers and persons suffer if we do not also temember that we also teach about human goods that must be balanced practically and politically in a prioritized way.

It is to this aspect of Catholic life and the just treatment of immigrants that I now wish to turn. To do this, I will use a document issued jointly by the United States Bishops Conference and the Mexican Bishops Conference in 2003. The discussion of principles found there is found in similar form in other documents, but this one remains particularly relevant and lends itself to the kind of discourse I am describing.

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Unamuno on the King of landless exiles:

«I have no man», we say in the anguish

of mortal life; yet you [Christ] respond:

Such is the Man, King of the nations

of the landless exiles, of the Holy Church,

of the people without a home that goes crossing

the mortal desert behind the banner

and cypher of the eternal, which is the cross! (8)

Love of country and the pursuit of justice within a sovereign nation need not be seen as exclusive of charity and justice for a suffering immigrant population that is either already here, or is seeking entry. Thus, for example, the first principle enunciated some years ago in the joint letter from the US and Mexican bishops Conferences indicates that persons have a fundamental right to find opportunities in their homeland. (9)

This flows from a basic human reality: we have in us a natural love for our own homelands and the cultures that flourish there. This is true in the United States and it is true in Mexico or in Honduras. As a basic norm, people and families should be able to live, raise their families, work and enjoy basic human goods like security, and education in their native land. Most people would prefer to stay in the country where they were born, if conditions permit it. Many immigrant parents I know dream of one day being able to go back home and raise their children there, if conditions back home would allow.

There are many places in the world where there is a state of affairs that roughly provides the kind of social equilibrium that this principle describes; and there are many places where these conditions are nearly non-existent. Immigration tends to happen when people do not judge they have a chance to survive and raise a family in their native place.

This principle (i.e. people have a right to stay home) has the character of a kind of temporal end, and as such is rightly held in sight as we discuss the other principles that the bishops identify as morally relevant to the just treatment of immigrants. It is also a principle which is admittedly beyond your or my personal ability to enact today, by personal effort alone. We can contribute to it (look for the Catholic Relief Services website), but it is not something we can do in the same way we can make a sandwich for a person who is hungry.

The principle points to the need to formulate a cooperative and cohesive response from peoples and nations around the world, principally in developmental support for countries where poverty and insecurity exist in devastating proportions. Such efforts take time to have effect, and certainly the bishops do not suggest that we alone in the United States are solely responsible for helping promote the human good in other parts of the world.

Thus, there is a second, closely related consideration that flows from the first: Persons have the right to migrate to support themselves and their families. The Church recognizes that all the goods of the earth belong to all people. When persons cannot find employment in their country of origin to support themselves and their families, they have a right to find work elsewhere in order to survive. Sovereign nations should provide ways to accommodate this right. (10)

Thus, realistically, immigration is most often the human response to a moment of crisis, of people responding to hardship and fear. Today, immigrants are often pawns in a harsh power-game that involves governments on one side and criminality and corruption on the other. In some parts of the world the distinction between the two is not so easy to see.

Two things that I want to note about this principle, which is in some ways the nub of the question today. The principle exists in relation to the Catholic teaching about the universal destination of all goods. Like the right to private property, sovereign control of borders is not an absolute; it is rightly accommodated in view of the right of persons to survive. (11) Further, there is a recognition that this principle of social good must be politically accommodated as an expression of political responsibility. This implies a willingness to revisit how well a nation is responding to conditions of poverty, drought and famine within its own borders and in other countries. In times of crisis, a global or hemispheric response is called for, and this may require a more generous policy of receptivity to immigrants. In principle, though, a Catholic cannot say “that is none of our nation’s concern”.

Subordinated to these two general principles is another that can only be understood in relation to the prior more universal principles. Sovereign nations do have the right to control their borders. (12) This principle predates the modern nation-state, though it accommodates to the current reality. (13) This principle is rooted in a judgment about the good of promoting a cohesive social order that acknowledges the diversity of familial, cultural, social and national identity patterns. The neighbor is the neighbor precisely because we live distinct familial and national dynamics. Law recognizes this, and history shows it is a principle that has stable meaning and yet admits of shifting applications over time.

In the current context, the right to enforce internationally recognized borders is itself conditioned by a responsibility to do so with an eye on the previous principles articulated, and on the realistic appraisal of national resources. More powerful economic nations, which have the ability to protect and feed their residents, have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows. (14) This is a call to application on the level of political prudence of the Scriptural injunction Share your bread with the hungry; shelter the oppressed and the homeless. Clothe the naked when you see them, and turn not your back on your own (Is 58, 7).

The final two principles articulated in the joint document move decidedly to the particular, and thus begin to address the practical question of how to respond to persons who are at the border, or who wish to come into the United States because of what amounts to the proximate danger of perishing in their homeland. Thus, the United States and Mexican bishops integrate into the narrative of principles a special word about refugees and asylum seekers: They should be afforded protection. Those who flee wars and persecution should be protected by the global community. This requires, at a minimum, that migrants have a right to claim refugee status without incarceration and to have their claims fully considered by a competent authority. (15)

And at its most immediate, the bishops reiterate the obligation of those charged with law enforcement to do so with due regard to the dignity of persons who migrate: Regardless of their legal status, migrants, like all persons, possess inherent human dignity that should be respected. Often they are subject to punitive laws and harsh treatment from enforcement officers from both receiving and transit countries. Government policies that respect the basic human rights of the undocumented are necessary. (16) Here, the point is about how persons entering the country without the documentary permissions a sovereign state may require are in fact treated when apprehended. As “Strangers no Longer” puts it: While the sovereign state may impose reasonable limits on immigration, the common good is not served when the basic human rights of the individual are violated. (17)

The call of the American Catholic bishops for a comprehensive reform of the current immigration law is mostly about how to balance the goods outlined in these principles I have outlined. It is a call for reasonable political will, and it involves a realistic accommodation of the particular situations affecting immigrants today. It is not adequate, from a Catholic point of view, to base a national immigration policy on purely economic criteria. The fact of global economic displacements, of war or lawless violence in numerous parts of the world must be addressed in a way that reflects a realistic response to a proximate threat to human life and its proximate goods. 

In particular, national policy should reflect the fact that the family is the most basic pedagogical vehicle for wider human and social cohesion. For this reason, the bishops continue to ask that the law recognize that deportations resulting in the separation of parents and children is harmful to the good individuals, of the family, and of the country. If families are separated, the whole fabric of the culture unravels. The breakdown of the family structure vitiates the social good because it directly affects the formation of the young.

In the political order, to frame the discussion around cases of obvious crimes and misdeeds committed by members of “the immigrant population”, for example, often aims rhetorically to short-circuit the discussion. Within a generous response to immigrant persons and families can be accommodated a legitimate concern for stopping criminal elements from injuring others, either here or abroad. A great many immigrants that I know are seeking permission to stay in the United States because they are fleeing the very same kinds of criminal elements and activities that we rightly do not want causing harm here. One of the tragedies of the mutually exclusive narratives, and of our anemic discourse is that we do not currently have a an effective legal way to distinguish between immigrants who are fleeing criminals, and immigrants who are criminals.

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Let us return now to the concrete particular, the phantasm of our social thinking, the reckoning rod and builder’s square of our human living. 

A couple of years ago I met a young man in Honduras, 16 years old. His parents were either dead or gone, he didn’t say. He had recently been summarily deported from Mexico. He told me he had tried 5 times to get the United States, because there was nothing for him at home; the gangs would kill him if he stayed. He said he would try again. He wanted to have a life, he said, a job, maybe a little house and get married. And if he didn’t make it to the US, he would try to live in Mexico. At least there, he said, you can have a life. I think of this young man often.

I do not tell you about him to stir your sentiments. I tell you because there are hundreds of thousands like him, who live at the edge of human society, They are the ones who are told there is no room for you here, and there is no room for you anywhere else: «it  is not our concern what happens to you».

He is just one young man. But our political activity as Catholics must keep faith with him if we are to keep faith with Christ. Maybe he is still alive, maybe he is in Mexico; maybe he has a grandmother somewhere praying for him. And maybe someone will respond to him. He is in some real way Christ Himself whom Velázquez and Unamuno sought, that particular wounded flesh, to whom also we we must ultimately return.

While the earth in loneliness sleeps,

there watches the white moon; the Man watches

from his Cross, while men sleep;

watches now the man without blood, the Man white

like the moon of the black night;

watches now the Man that gave all his blood

that the peoples might know that they are men. (18)

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Notes:

1) Miguel de Unamuno, “El Cristo de Velázquez”, I, iv:

Mientras la tierra sueña solitaria,

vela la blanca luna; vela el Hombre

desde su cruz, mientras los hombres sueñan;

vela el Hombre sin sangre, el Hombre blanco

como la luna de la noche negra;

vela el Hombre que dio toda su sangre

por que las gentes sepan que son hombres.

2) Thomas Pfau: Minding the Modern, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).

3)  See Saint Bonaventure, Life of Francis.

4)  Miguel de Unamuno, “El Cristo de Velázquez”, I, vi:

Tú eres el Hombre, la Razón, la Norma, 

tu cruz es nuestra vara, la medida 

del dolor que sublima, y es la escuadra 

de nuestra derechura: ella endereza 

cuando caído al corazón del hombre. 

Tú has humanado al universo, Cristo. 

“¡He aquí el Hombre!” por quien Dios es algo. 

5)  Caritas in Veritate, no. 7. 

6)  The empiricism and positivism that are the godparents of this emphasis on purely willed relations have roots in the earlier adoption of univocal discourse over the analogical, and the voluntarisms that followed upon it. See John Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: Wiley and Sons, 2013), and Charles Taylor (A Secular Age: Belknap Press, Harvard, 2007)

7)  Summa Theologiae, Ia, 84, 7.

8) Miguel de Unamuno, “El Cristo de Velázquez”, I, vi:

«¡No tengo Hombre!”, decimos en los trances 

de vida mortal; mas Tú contestas: 

¡Tal es el Hombre, Rey de las naciones 

de desterrados, de la Iglesia Santa, 

del pueblo sin hogar que va cruzando 

el desierto mortal tras de la enseña 

y cifra de lo eterno, que es la cruz!… 

9)  Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, Issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano, January 22, 2003, no 34: All persons have the right to find in their own countries the economic, political, and social opportunities to live in dignity and achieve a full life through the use of their God-given gifts. In this context, work that provides a just, living wage is a basic human need.

10)  Strangers No Longer, no. 35.

11)  CCC no. 2404:  «In his use of things man should regard the external goods he legitimately owns not merely as exclusive to himself but common to others also, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as himself.» The ownership of any property makes its holder a steward of Providence, with the task of making it fruitful and communicating its benefits to others, first of all his family.

12)  Strangers no Longer, no 36: The Church recognizes the right of sovereign nations to control their territories but rejects such control when it is exerted merely for the purpose of acquiring additional wealth. More powerful economic nations, which have the ability to protect and feed their residents, have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows.

13)  See Jacques Maritain, Man and the State. 

14) Strangers no Longer, no. 36.

15) Strangers no Longer, no. 37.

16) Strangers no Longer, no. 38.

17) Strangers no Longer, no. 39. 

18)  Miguel de Unamuno, “El Cristo de Velázquez” I, iv: 

Mientras la tierra sueña solitaria,

vela la blanca luna; vela el Hombre

desde su cruz, mientras los hombres sueñan;

vela el Hombre sin sangre, el Hombre blanco

como la luna de la noche negra;

vela el Hombre que dio toda su sangre

por que las gentes sepan que son hombres.

—

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Saint Augustine, Tractate 96 on John:

Isto enim modo vos docebit Spiritus sanctus omnem veritatem, cum magis magisque diffundet in cordibus vestris caritatem.

«En efecto, de ese modo os enseñará el Espíritu Santo toda la verdad, cuando derrame más y más en vuestros corazones la caridad.»

«Indeed, in this way the Holy Spirit will teach you all truth, as he pours charity more and more into your hearts.»

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San Juan de Ávila, “Audi Fila et vide”:

“Y de aquí es, que aunque no hubiese infierno que amenazase, ni paraíso que convidase, ni mandamiento que constriñese, obraría el justo por sólo el amor de Dios lo que obra.”

«And from here it follows, that even if there were no hell that threatened, no paradise that beckoned, no commandment that would constrain, the just would do what he does for only the love of God.”

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Leo the Great, Sermo XXI in Nativitate Domini:

«Memento cuius capitis et cuius corporis sis membrum.
Reminiscere quia erutus de potestate tenebrarum, translatus es in Dei lumen et regnum.
Per baptismatis sacramentum Spiritus Sancti factus es templum»

«Recuerda la Cabeza y el Cuerpo de quien eres miembro. Recuerda que fuiste rescatado del poder de las tinieblas y trasladado a la luz y al reino de Dios. Por el misterio del Bautismo fuisteis hechos templo del Espíritu Santo»

«Remember the Head and the Body of whom you are a member. Remember that you were rescued from the power of darkness and brought [translated] into the light and kingdom of God. Through the mystery of Baptism you were made a temple of the Holy Spirit.»

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John Henry Newman

Sometimes I enjoy reading Newman more in Spanish than in English. Most times actually. The Spanish translation of the Parroquial and Plain Sermons by VÍCTOR GARCÍA RUIZ, working in collaborative with José Morales y Luis Galván (Ediciones Encuentro, S.A., Madrid. 2020) is really quite fine. Here is a good example (The English, which is incomparable, follows below):

Sermones parroquiales/Sermón 26, LA MADUREZ CRISTIANA, 15 de mayo de 1831

«Pero, si hay entre nosotros (bien puede haberlos) alguno que, como el joven rico, «arrodillado» ante Cristo y «amado» por Él (Mc 10,17 y 21), ha obedecido sus mandatos desde la juventud y, sin embargo, no puede sentirse más que «afligido» ante la idea de abandonar sus gratas perspectivas, sus idolatrías infantiles y sus gozosas ilusiones de felicidad terrenal, a ese le animo a estar alegre y ser valiente. ¿Acaso te pide el Salvador algo más que lo que te arrancará el dueño duro y malvado que desea tu ruina? Cristo te dice que dejes el mundo; pero ¿acaso el mundo no te va a dejar pronto a ti, en cualquier caso? ¿Lo vas a conservar si te haces su esclavo? Por mucho que ahora te prometa otra cosa, ¿no sabes que el príncipe de este mundo, que usa el mundo para tentarte, te lo acabará quitando? ¿Qué te pide tu Salvador sino mirar las cosas como realmente son, considerarlas como puros instrumentos suyos, y creer que lo bueno es bueno porque Él lo quiere, que Él puede otorgar sus bendiciones por medio de piedras duras lo mismo que por medio de pan, en el desierto lo mismo que en un campo cuajado de frutos, si tenemos fe en Él, que nos da el verdadero pan del cielo?…»

But if there be those among us, and such there well may be, who, like the young ruler, «worshipping Christ,» and «loved» by Him, and obeying His commandments from their youth up, yet cannot but be «sorrowful» at the thought of giving up their pleasant visions, their childish idolatries, and their bright hopes of earthly happiness, such I bid be of good cheer, and take courage. What is it your Saviour requires of you, more than will also be exacted from you by that hard and evil master, who desires your ruin? Christ bids you give up the world; but will not, at any rate, the world soon give up you? Can you keep it, by being its slave? Will not he, whose creature of temptation it is, the prince of the world, take it from you, whatever he at present promises? What does your Lord require of you, but to look at all things as they really are, to account them merely as His instruments, and to believe that good is good because He wills it, that He can bless as easily by hard stone as by bread, in the desert as in the fruitful field, if we have faith in him who gives us the true bread from heaven?

XXV Sunday: Lk 16,1-13
On money,
the priorities for its use in the Gospel and in the Diocese;
on having someone to speak for us on judgment day.
-El amor de la Iglesia debe de extenderse a los necesitados, y así reflejar el amor de Cristo en el mundo.
https://youtu.be/9SpqMp8S4oU?feature=shared

(The English iteration follows the Spanish text)

Reunión de Obispos de la Frontera entre Texas y México

29 al 31 de agosto del 2025

Piedras Negras, Coahuila

En el nombre de Jesucristo, los obispos de la frontera sur de Texas y norte de México saludamos al pueblo de Dios que peregrina en nuestras Diócesis y en esta Diócesis de Piedras Negras. Fuimos recibidos por Monseñor Alfonso Miranda Guardiola, quien recientemente sucedió a Monseñor Alonso Garza Treviño como Obispo de Piedras Negras.

Los obispos nos hemos reunido para rezar juntos y compartir nuestro caminar en las Iglesias particulares que acompañamos y dirigimos. Así como para refrendar nuestra amistad, fortalecer nuestros lazos, y apoyar nuestros centros de servicio a los migrantes y más desfavorecidos, especialmente en estos tiempos que vemos con preocupación la falta de respeto a los derechos fundamentales y a la dignidad de toda persona humana.

Hemos visitado la Casa del Migrante Frontera Digna, y hemos tenido un encuentro vivo y fraterno con algunos de los hermanos que han vivido la deportación, el desplazamiento, y con muchos que también han venido de lejanas tierras, escapando de situaciones intolerables en sus países, apostándolo todo con la ilusión de tener un futuro digno y mejor, no obstante las dificultades y puertas cerradas encontradas en su camino. Y ante esta situación de incertidumbre, vulnerabilidad, y desamparo, les hemos reiterado nuestra cercanía y apoyo integral.

De igual forma, hemos conversado sobre temas eclesiales importantes, como es el caso de la carta pastoral: “Lo vio, se acercó y lo cuidó,” elaborado en Panamá en el 2024 por obispos fronterizos y obispos responsables para ministerio con migrantes en América del Norte, América Central, y el Caribe, buscando acciones comunes para el bien de nuestros hermanos en condición de movilidad humana. En base a esto, acordamos impulsar las cuatro líneas de acción de la reunión sostenida por los mismos miembros en Costa Rica en este mismo mes de agosto, a saber: a. Formación integral a todo nivel; b. Información y concientización sobre el valor, la contribución y beneficios de la migración; c. Defensa de la integralidad de los derechos humanos y d. Sostenibilidad.

Juntos hemos estudiado el tema de los jóvenes y su adicción a las drogas, y de los centros de rehabilitación que los apoyan, y de las acciones que como Iglesia podemos realizar para ayudarlos más, con la conciencia de que muchas veces este problema deriva en un alto número de suicidios en ambos países.

Hemos examinado otros temas pastorales importantes, como la situación migratoria de los trabajadores religiosos, la protección de jóvenes y adultos vulnerables, y los sacramentos de iniciación. Nuestro objetivo es mejorar nuestros ministerios mediante el intercambio de buenas prácticas.

Este encuentro bianual ha contado con la participación de trece obispos, junto con algunos sacerdotes, religiosos, y expertos laicos. Los Obispos de la Frontera Tex-Mex se han reunido durante más de treinta años en uno de los ejemplos más consistentes y fructíferos del mundo, en cuanto colaboración transfronteriza con espíritu de solidaridad eclesial, se refiere.

Agradecemos al pueblo de esta querida Diócesis las atenciones, hospitalidad, y el intercambio cultural compartido, así como el encuentro con los periodistas, culminando esta experiencia con la Eucaristía solemne celebrada en la Catedral.

Los bendecimos con cariño, y los encomendamos a nuestra santísima madre, la Virgen María para que nos alcance con su intercesión frutos abundantes para bien de todos nuestros pueblos.

Obispos Tex-Mex:

Mons. Mario Avilés Obispo Auxiliar de Brownsville

Mons. Brendan Cahill Obispo de Victoria

Mons. Daniel Flores Obispo de Brownsville

Mons. Gustavo García Siller Arzobispo de San Antonio

Mons. Mark Seitz Obispo de El Paso

Mons. Michael Sis Obispo de San Ángelo

Mons. Jaime Tamayo Obispo de Laredo

Mons. Alonso Garza Treviño Obispo Emérito de Piedras Negras

Mons. Hilario González Obispo de Saltillo

Mons. Eugenio Lira Rugarcía Obispo de Matamoros Reynosa

Mons. Alfonso Miranda G. Obispo de Piedras Negras

Mons. Carlos Santos Obispo Auxiliar de Monterrey

Mons. José Guadalupe Torres Obispo de Ciudad Juárez

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Meeting of the Tex-Mex Border Bishops

August 29-31, 2025

Piedras Negras, Coahuila

In the name of Jesus Christ, the bishops of the southern border of Texas and the northern border of Mexico greet the people of God who are pilgrims in our dioceses and in this Diocese of Piedras Negras. We were hosted by Bishop Alfonso Miranda Guardiola, who recently succeeded Bishop Alonso Garza Treviño as Bishop of Piedras Negras.

We bishops have convened to pray together and share our journey in the particular Churches we accompany and lead. We also gathered to reaffirm our friendship, strengthen our ties, and support our centers of service to migrants and the most disadvantaged, especially in these times when we see with concern the lack of respect for the fundamental rights and dignity of every human person.

We visited the Casa del Migrante Frontera Digna (Dignified Border Migrant House) and had a lively and fraternal encounter with some of our brothers and sisters who have experienced deportation and displacement, and with many of those who have also come from distant lands, escaping intolerable situations in their countries, risking everything with the hope of a dignified and better future, despite the difficulties and closed doors encountered along the way. And in the face of this situation of uncertainty, vulnerability, and helplessness, we have reiterated our closeness and comprehensive support.

Likewise, we have discussed important ecclesial issues, such as the pastoral letter «He Saw Him, He Drew Near to Him, and He Cared for Him,» written in Panama in 2024 by border bishops and bishops responsible for ministry with migrants in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean, seeking shared actions for the good of our brothers and sisters in conditions of human mobility. Based on this, we agreed to promote the four lines of action from the meeting held by the same members in Costa Rica this August, namely: a. Comprehensive training at all levels; b. Information and awareness-raising on the value, contribution, and benefits of migration; c. Defense of the integrity of human rights; and d. Sustainability.

Together we have studied the issue of young people and their drug addiction, and the rehabilitation centers that support them, and the actions we as a Church can take to further help them, with the awareness that this problem often leads to a high number of suicides in both countries.

We have examined other important pastoral issues, such as the immigration status of religious workers, the protection of youth and vulnerable adults, and the sacraments of initiation. Our goal is to improve our ministries through the sharing of best practices.

This biannual encounter has included thirteen bishops, along with some priests, religious, and lay experts. The Tex-Mex Border Bishops have been meeting for more than thirty years in one of the world’s most consistent and fruitful examples of cross-border collaboration in a spirit of ecclesial solidarity.

We thank the people of this beloved Diocese for their kindness, hospitality, and shared cultural exchange, as well as for the meeting with journalists. This experience culminated with the solemn Eucharist celebrated in the Cathedral.

We bless them with affection and entrust them to our most holy mother, the Virgin Mary, so that through her intercession she may obtain abundant fruits for the good of all our peoples.

Tex-Mex Bishops:

Most Rev. Mario Avilés Auxiliary Bishop of Brownsville

Most Rev. Brendan Cahill Bishop of Victoria

Most Rev. Daniel Flores Bishop of Brownsville

Most Rev. Gustavo García Siller Archbishop of San Antonio

Most Rev. Mark Seitz Bishop of El Paso

Most Rev. Michael Sis Bishop of San Angelo

Most Rev. James Tamayo Bishop of Laredo

Most Rev. Alonso Garza Treviño Bishop Emeritus of Piedras Negras

Most Rev. Hilario González Bishop of Saltillo

Most Rev. Eugenio Lira Rugarcía Bishop of Matamoros-Reynosa

Most Rev. Alfonso Miranda G. Bishop of Piedras Negras

Most Rev. Carlos Santos Auxiliary Bishop of Monterrey

Most Rev. José Guadalupe Torres Bishop of Ciudad Juárez

Feast of the Holy Cross, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, BrownsvilleTX

-On looking to the Cross of Christ for light and direction in angry times.
-Sobre mirar la Cruz de Cristo en busca de luz y dirección en tiempos de ira.

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