Immigrants and the Catholic Church

Last Spring, I preached at the seminary graduation at St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa. It is the motherhouse of the Benedictine Order in this country. It was founded by Abbot Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., who came to the United States from Bavaria in 1846 because he was concerned that Catholic German immigrants were losing their faith here. From St. Vincent’s were founded the great abbey of St. John’s in Collegeville, Minn., and smaller foundations like St. Procopius, now in Lisle, and St. Bede’s in Peru, Ill. The Benedictines who served in Chicago at St. Procopius parish, now staffed by the Jesuits, and at St. Joseph’s on Orleans Street, now served by Archdiocesan priests, trace their history back to St. Vincent’s. Another Chicago connection is Cardinal George Mundelein, who did his theological studies at the seminary at St. Vincent’s before finishing his studies in Rome.

A congregation of women religious that came to this country to serve immigrants is that of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who founded Columbus Hospital and many other institutions in Chicago. Their founder, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, died at Columbus Hospital after a life filled with travels to all those places where Italians were immigrants. She was the first U.S. citizen to be canonized a saint. Her concern was the same as that of Abbot Wimmer a half a century earlier: her compatriots were in danger of losing their Catholic faith along with their native homeland. That concern was shared by the Claretians, the Scalabrini Fathers and Sisters and other religious orders who have given life to this Archdiocese in caring for immigrants and their children.

Shortly before I went to St. Vincent’s Archabbey, I went to Poland to ask for some priests and seminarians to serve the new Polish immigrants who have been coming in great numbers to Chicago in recent years. We have also been looking for more priests and Sisters from Mexico and South America to accompany the many Hispanics who now constitute a third of the Catholics of the Archdiocese.

The first Archbishop of Chicago, Patrick Feehan, established 140 parishes to accommodate Catholic immigrants to Chicago in a 20-year period from 1880 to 1900. Many of the most beautiful churches in the city were built by these immigrants from a bewildering variety of European countries. Each group brought priests of their own language to minister to the first generation of immigrants. Today, rather than establish separate parishes for different ethnic groups, the pastoral policy in the United States is to form multi-cultural and multi-lingual parishes. This means everyone has to shift and adjust, and I am truly impressed by the patience and good humor of Catholics as their parishes change to welcome brothers and sisters in the faith from foreign lands. This welcoming attitude helps to ease the transition for immigrants as they learn how to live here as practicing Catholics.

The Church’s pastoral concern for immigrants reflects her understanding of herself as an “institutional immigrant”, sent out from Jerusalem 2,000 years ago to go to all nations. The Church is everywhere an immigrant, and no immigrant escapes her concern. By reason of our faith, we are, as the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:9) reminds us, “strangers in a strange land”, even when we call that land our home.

Chicagoans and people in the metropolitan area are fond of speaking of their neighborhoods. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37), Jesus taught us that every stranger in need is our neighbor. Refugees as well as immigrants command the Church’s care. Last June, the U.S. bishops approved a paper on immigrants and refugees which draws attention to those who are often left by the wayside in modern life—”persons recognized by the international community as persecuted and in need of security, asylum seekers, persons who enter a nation and request protection from persecution.” Even about illegal immigrants, Pope John Paul II has written: “In the Church, no one is a stranger, and the Church is not foreign to anyone, anywhere. As a sacrament of unity and thus a sign and binding force for the whole human race, the Church is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and accepted as brothers and sisters …. Today the illegal immigrant comes before us like the ‘stranger’ in whom Jesus asks to be recognized. To welcome him and show him solidarity is a duty of hospitality and fidelity to Christian identity itself.”

Besides welcoming individuals and families and offering them legal services and emergency help, the Church is also involved in the national conversation about immigration policy. This is a thorny subject, because both the cultural heritage of the immigrants and the culture of the host country itself deserve respect. There is no a priori formula for working out these cultural considerations; in fact, immigration policy is most often driven by the simple recognition on the part of policy makers and legislators that the U.S. economy would collapse without immigrant workers.

The social and moral consequences of our not very coherent U.S. immigration policies are left to be worked out community by community, parish by parish, family by family, individual by individual.

The United States is a nation of immigrants, since only the Native Peoples are pre-American. Every other racial and cultural group came sometime in the last 500 years and most have come to this continent since the foundation of our country in the late eighteenth century. Generation after generation has received new immigrants and made room for them in the context of a social history that is without parallel. Looking again beyond immigrants to refugees, the United States since 1951 has received close to five million men, women and children; and the Catholic Church has resettled more than one million of them. These are not just statistics from social and political and economic history. Ours is a story of people established here helping people newly arrived, a story which is moral and spiritual because it makes visible Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan.

Pope Paul VI, at the end of the Second Vatican Council a generation ago, said that the spirituality of the Council is the spirituality of the Good Samaritan. We are living that spirituality here in our welcoming strangers and discovering that they are brothers and sisters in Christ. They, in turn, enrich our lives in ways both new and old. May the Lord keep us together in mutual respect and peace and joy. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago