MARCH 2023: Why Does Francis Focus on Migration?

Anytime I quote Ivereigh and/or Francis, I place the exact language in quotes, When I am summarizing either of them it is in regular type. When I am interpreting, commenting or questioning it is in italics.

Why Does Francis Focus on Migration?

“Never has a pope focused so consistently on a social issue as has Francis on migration these past ten years. What St. John Paul II did for the unborn and the ethic of life, Francis has done for migrants and the ethic of fraternity.”

Why?

“just as communism was personal for Karol Wojtyła, so is migration for Jorge Mario Bergoglio. As the child of Italian émigrés who remade their lives in Buenos Aires in the 1930s, he knows firsthand about the vulnerability of those who have been uprooted.”

Another reasons “ is the scale and urgency of the matter. There have never been as many people on the move as there are today: the UN’s pre-pandemic estimate was an astonishing 70 million. If they were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world, after China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. Yet an astonishing 85 percent of all migrants are hosted not by Europe or North America, but by the developing world.”

“a deeper motive emerges from the more than seven hundred pages of words he has written and spoken on the topic "

Migrants

“The main reason Francis, as successor of St. Peter, has put this topic at the heart of his pontificate is that—to paraphrase Bill Clinton—it’s the Gospel, stupid.” 

Sacrifice vs. Mercy

Ivereign contrasts two hermeneutics, one of sacrifice the other of mercy. How much of this thinking is Ivereign and how much is Francis is not clear. My hunch is that hermeneutic is being used to interpret life as well as biblical texts. 

"The 'hermeneutic of sacrifice' is the indifference of Cain toward the fate of Abel, whom he has disposed of: 'Am I my brother’s keeper?' (Genesis 4:9). It is born of rivalry, of the fear that the other will dispossess me unless I dispense with him. 

"The 'hermeneutic of mercy,' on the other hand, is the response of Yahweh to Moses in the third chapter of Exodus: 'I have observed the misery of my people…. I have heard their cry…and I have come down to deliver them' (Exodus 3:7–8). 

Clearly sacrifice is an important way of understanding scripture. Cain slew Able because God accepted Able's sacrifice rather than that of Cain. One gives some of one goods to God (and neighbors) in the hope that God will continue to show favor. Indirectly that justifies the unequal distribution of goods as being of divine origin. The constant prophetic critique of religious sacrifice is that it is worthless before God if it neglects the "widow, the orphan, and the alien among you."  

This notion of hermeneutic seeming is being extended into philosophies as well as theologies which justify the current economic system as the best of possible worlds, where the well- being of the poor is sacrificed for the welfare of the rich.

When Jesus in Matthew tells the Pharisees to go ponder why God asks for mercy, not sacrifice, he is inviting them to understand salvation itself (Hosea 6:6). It is to realize, as Francis said last year in Malta, that “the Kingdom of God must be built with migrants and refugees and victims of trafficking, for without them it would not be the Kingdom that God wants. 

Building a People

"During the course of his pontificate, Francis has developed two key insights with respect to migrants. First, building a collective subject capable of meeting current challenges lies in our capacity to see the needs of the stranger—to form a “people” capable of acting “more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home,” as he puts it in Fratelli tutti. 

"Collective subjective" means that we begin to experience ourselves as a people, as "we" rather than as us versus them.

Second, in the process of helping to construct that collective subject, we demonstrate both our human fraternity and our fidelity as a Church to Christ.

Francis sees the "people" being formed as both a human and a spiritual society. In the Joy of the Gospel he thinks that every generation of a "people" have to rediscover themselves. Although it is in the section about applications to society, it could imply that every generation of Christians have to rediscover themselves.

 As Francis put it in his first message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, “migrants and refugees…are an occasion that Providence gives us to help build a more just society, a more perfect democracy, a more united country, a more fraternal world and a more open and evangelical Christian community.”

The History of Papal Teaching on Migrants

"Francis builds on a modern papal teaching that stretches back to the nineteenth century, The Church became a key actor in the resettlement and integration of émigrés—as the Piedmontese Salesians were for the Bergoglio family in Buenos Aires—and the Church is still today the single largest agent of integration of migrants across the world."

Both were written against the backdrop of a new global order in which capital and goods flow freely but most people cannot, and in which migration is increasingly global, from south to north.

Francis has drawn attention to the suffering and tragedy of the liminal spaces between nation-states, the no man’s lands where the absence of refugee-sharing agreements among states is leading to brazen violations of UN conventions, and where hard-border politics have led to the creation of vast new human-trafficking networks controlled by criminal gangs.

Addressing migrants in South Sudan, Francis noted how “great numbers of children born in recent years have known only the reality of camps for displaced persons,” where, losing all connection with their native land and its traditions, they live ghostly lives, unable to move either forward or backward. “The future cannot lie in refugee camps,” the pope made clear.

More than two million people have tried to cross the Mediterranean to Europe since 2014, mostly from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa; at least twenty-five thousand of them have died in the process, victims of the irresponsibility of human traffickers, but also of the decisions of border authorities whose countries are intent on deterring such journeys. In February 2015, two years after Francis’s first trip to Lampedusa, another migrant boat sank off the island. It was carrying a thousand people, each of whom had been charged $1,500 by traffickers. After Italy raised the boat and towed it to land, autopsies were performed. There were layers and layers of bodies crammed onto the boats, like nineteenth-century slave ships.

On Lesbos and Malta, he has spoken of the stranding and capsizing of boats of refugees as a “shipwreck of civilization.” In Cyprus he said: “We read stories of the concentration camps of the last century and we say, ‘How could this possibly have happened?’ Brothers and sisters, it is happening today, on nearby coasts!”

Enter, at this point, the Good Samaritan. At Lampedusa, Francis likened the world’s refusal to take responsibility for the suffering of migrants to “the hypocrisy of the priest and the Levite.” The hypocrisy is that the very people tasked with mediating God’s mercy turn out to be in thrall to the logic of sacrifice. They turn from the ailing stranger, he explains in Let Us Dream, because “they are trying to preserve their own place—their roles, their status quo—faced with a crisis that tests them.” Their religiosity has become an identity they cling to fearfully; and in appropriating religion for enrichment or self-preservation they have corrupted it. Incapable of mediating God’s merciful action, they fail to create a new future either for the wounded man or for themselves.

In both accounts God has entered history as a migrant, and the response to that migrant is what drives the drama of salvation,

Every brother or sister in need, when abandoned or ignored by the society in which I live, becomes an existential foreigner, even if born in the same country,” Francis notes. The way we receive all outcasts becomes the test of our capacity for society itself, for moving from “I” to “we.”

Ricoeur says that Jesus’ answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is that “the neighbor is not a social object but a behavior in the first person…. I do not have a neighbor; I make myself someone else’s neighbor.” 

Relationships of mutual self-interest, partnership, and contract are the backbone of institutions; they are how you get stuff done, as the Church itself exemplifies in its manifold projects and organizations. As Ricoeur notes, the act of “neighboring” passes through social institutions such as the inn where the Samaritan delegates the care of his wounded charge. Indeed, a healthy association (or institution, organization, or nation) constantly renews itself by “neighboring” the stranger.

Partnerships and associations that turn their backs on the stranger are destined for putrefaction. They may be rich and successful, but they are dead inside. Social bonds are reduced to a tool for the pursuit of individual interests, rather than a realization of a common project

This is the first task of the Church: to tell the truth, and to tell it in human terms. “This crisis which can be measured in numbers and statistics, we want instead to measure with names, stories, families,” the pope said in Juárez

Second, discern. Perceiving God’s grace in the migrant crisis begins with looking and then moves to a question: What can be done? Francis frequently reminds Europe of its “demographic winter,” and of the vital importance of migration to its economy, history, and culture. As an alternative to “narrow forms of nationalism,” Francis offers a vision of mutual interdependence and reciprocity in a world of plenty. He reminds us of what the history of nations shows: a healthy, dynamic society is one whose roots are constantly nourished by incorporating the gifts strangers bring.

Third, act. In September 2015 Francis asked every parish and religious community in Europe to house at least one migrant family “fleeing death by war and hunger

Throughout his pontificate, Francis has consistently argued that borderlands are the places where the Gospel is being both resisted and enacted in our time, just as they were two thousand years ago. Then as now, God enters our human story as a wounded stranger, a migrant who has just one question in his or her heart: Will I be made welcome by people I can trust?