While Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley distributed Communion through the slats in the tall fence at the Mexican border to believers on the other side, hands reached out through the bars.
“We have lost a sense of responsibility to our brothers and sisters,” O’Malley said in his homily at the Mass in the Desert, quoting Pope Francis in a sermon that highlighted the 400 bodies found near the border every year and the 25,000 children, most of them Central American, who arrived in the United States last year unaccompanied by an adult.
In an interview during two days of events surrounding a push for immigration reform, I asked O’Malley about a bishop’s remark to me earlier in the day that comprehensive reform was a “dead dog, and the only question is whose porch it winds up on.”
O’Malley laughed and said, “That’s an interesting metaphor” on “an issue on which we’ve had many false starts.” But the way our government treats migrants, he said, is not something he and the seven other American bishops who came here can ignore, or that the church as a whole can, either.
“These immigrants are not different from our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who left horrific situations because they had the courage, the ambition, the desire to do something for their children,” he said.
During the 20 years he worked in Washington in the 1970s and ’80s, O’Malley said, “most of my parishioners were undocumented refugees. To me, they’re not statistics; they’re people, and I’ve seen the kinds of sacrifices and the suffering they’ve endured.”
The inspiration for this trip, he said, “was Pope Francis’s very first journey” after becoming pontiff, to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, “where thousands of people have perished trying to get into Europe, and we have a very similar situation here.” Francis visited Lampedusa to remember the 366 migrants who died when a boat sank off its coast last October.
More at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cardinal-omalley-immigrant-outreach-on-mexican-border-inspired-by-pope-francis/2014/04/01/55456b74-b91e-11e3-899e-bb708e3539dd_story.html