WELCOMING THE STRANGER AMONG
US
As a community and as a Parish we are becoming more and more diverse in
our ethnic heritage and backgrounds. Our Parish Council is discussing ways we can reach
out to newcomers in our midst - be they recent immigrants or long time Americans. In the
year 2000, the Bishops of the United States issued a document, Welcoming the Stranger
Among Us, concerning new immigrants, the conclusion of this document is worth our
mediating upon.
Pope John Paul II has callen for a new evangelization centered on the
person of Jesus Christ: "The encounter with the living Jesus Christ' is `the path to
conversion, communion and solidarity.'" This personal encounter with the risen Lord,
so abundantly recounted in the Gospels, Epistles, and Acts of the Apostles, leads to a
daily vision of the Lord present and active in the world, especially in the poor, in the
stranger, and in the migrant and refugee. Those most in need draw the members of the
Church out of their unawareness to a conversion of heart through which they are able to
offer a genuine and suitable welcome, to share together as brothers and sisters at the
same table, and to work side by side to improve the quality of life for society's most
vulnerable members. All of this is an expression of the Spirit of the risen Jesus being
poured out again on his followers.
The Holy Spirit made manifest at Pentecost enabled people of diverse
languages and cultures to understand the one message of salvation. The new evangelization
means openness to the gifts of the Spirit wherever they might appear. Our response to the
new immigration thus is informed by a renewed vision of what it is to be Church, and by a
new spirituality, informed by the Spirit of Pentecost present in the sacrament of
confirmation, which gives the power to discern the one message of the kingdom in the
diverse customs and languages of our immigrant brothers and sisters.
Immigrant communities give ample witness to what it is to be
Church—in their desire to worship as a people, in the faith, in their solidarity with
one another and with the weakest among them, in their devotion and their faithfulness to
the Church of their ancestors. For the Church in the United States to walk solidarity with
newcomers to our country is to live out our catholicity as a Church. The Church of the
twenty-first century will be, as it has always been a Church of many cultures, languages
and traditions, yet simultaneously one, as God is one—Father, Son and Holy
Spirit—unity in diversity.
The new immigration is a reminder of the pilgrim state of the Church,
made up of all those, regardless of race or class or national origin, who have been called
to the wedding banquet and have responded (Lk 14:23). As a pilgrim, the Church encompasses
in itself all the reality of human suffering and all the glory of the human spirit infused
with the grace of Christ. With its diverse pilgrim peoples, the Church in the United
States has known uprootedness and loss, persecution and flight, the search for a better
life, and the difficulties and disappointments of that search. The Church has known God's
grace as it lifts spirits in times of despair, sustain hope in the face of hopelessness,
and revives love despite evils and human frailties. In the one baptism, the Church
acknowledges God's call to conversion, while in the sacrament of the Eucharist, she enjoys
prefigured the glorious communion of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit. At the Eucharist
the Church prefigures the revelation of "a great multitude...from every nation, race,
people and tongue" (Rev 7:9).
In such a Eucharist, on that sunlit Jubilee Day of Migrant and
Refugees in St. Peters Square, Pope John Paul II summed up the challenge and hope for the
Church in the United States as it welcomes the immigrants of the new millennium in a very
simple but profound image:
Like the disciples of Emmaus, believers, supported by the living
presence of the risen Christ, become in turn the traveling companions of their brothers
and sisters in trouble, offering them the word which rekindles hope in their hearts. With
them they break the bond of friendship, brotherhood and mutual help. This is how to build
the civilization of love. This is how to proclaim the hoped-for coming of the new heavens
and the new earth to which we are heading. (no. 4)
