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July 26, 2007
True hospitality means
welcoming immigrant
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Herald
of Hope is a weekly column started by
former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland
in the Catholic Herald and written by
the bishops of the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
The Liturgy of the Word last Sunday at Mass haunted me.
God’s word was very much about the virtue of hospitality. Our first reading was from Genesis, remember, and was about the three visitors to Abraham and Sarah. Abraham actually bowed before the three guests, as if they were divine, so much did he honor guests. He bathed their feet and prepared them a meal.
As a matter of fact, Abraham’s three visitors were divine, and his welcome to them, his hospitality, was rewarded when the trinity of visitors told him that Sarah, his wife, would soon be pregnant.
No wonder the Hebrew Scriptures extol hospitality. Moses, in his law, orders the people of Israel to treat the alien fairly and justly, reminding them that their ancestors, too, were once strangers in a foreign land.
In our Gospel last Sunday, Jesus was himself a guest in the home of Martha and Mary in Bethany. He enjoyed their hospitality. He would even go so far as to tell us that on Judgment Day, we would be examined as to how we treated strangers. “For I was a stranger and you welcomed me….”
No wonder St. Benedict would posit in his Rule, Venit Hospes, venit Christus: “When a guest comes, Christ comes.”
I remarked at the beginning of this column that this teaching haunted me. Why?
Because I fear that we Americans, who rightly point to our Judeo-Christian values, have recently lost this one. I am afraid we are no longer hospitable.
Throughout our history, we in the United States have had glorious moments of hospitality. There have been years when the verse on the Statue of Liberty has been accurate. America has been at her best when she has welcomed the immigrant, the refugee, the alien. Our history tells us that our beloved country becomes stronger, more robust, when we open our doors to the immigrant.
Yet, candor forces us to admit that there have also been eras in our history when we have been unwelcoming, when we have scorned, feared, and mistreated the immigrant. And I’m scared that we are now in such an era!
I used to teach the history of the Catholic Church in the United States to university students. One of my lectures was always on immigration, logically, since the Catholic Church in the United States is 99 percent of immigrant stock.
Part of my lecture was positive, as I recounted how immigrants, beginning in the late 1820s and continuing through today, thrived in America, able to keep the faith of their homeland yet feel very much at home in the United States. At first they came from Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, France, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Russia, Ukraine, and later from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Their children (you and me) are as American as George and Martha Washington (whose ancestors came from England).
Yet I also had to give a negative side to the history of immigration, as I taught the class how every surge of immigrants usually ignited some hatred and bigotry.
n In the 1840s and 1850s, it was the Nativists, who despised foreigners and Catholics, depicting them as dirty, lazy, drunk, un-American criminals who would dilute pure white America. They even began a political party, the Know-Nothings, that was very popular.
n In the 1870s and 1880s it was the American Protective Association, which warned of threats to the American way of life posed by the filthy, lazy Catholic-immigrants from Poland, Germany, Italy, and Ireland.
n When immigration started again after Word War I, the Ku Klux Klan arose, to defend white, Protestant America from Catholics, Jews, Blacks, and others who were coming to this country, they claimed, to water-down pure American stock.
When I would teach the university students about those spans of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic hatred throughout our history, they would usually smile in disbelief, chuckle at the raw animosity of these bigots, but then observe, “Well, we’re glad those days are over, and happy that such prejudice would never happen again in our own, enlightened, tolerant American society.” At which point I would have to remind them that one of history’s major lessons is that “the more things change, the more things remain the same.”
I hate to admit it, but I was right. Check the blogs, tune-in to talk-radio, listen even to some of our politicians: the year-long debate on immigration reform has unleashed another wave of Nativist, hateful bigotry, mostly against our Latino neighbors, who want nothing more than what my great-great grandfather from County Cavan wanted: freedom, a job, a chance, a united family.
Thoughtful, reasonable people can and should debate the way our country controls its borders. That is a right and duty of any country. Our national security requires it.
But a thoughtful, reasonable American, especially if he or she cherishes the moral teaching of the Bible, is always going to look with compassion upon the immigrant, be sensitive to their plight, eager to welcome the alien to a country whose proudest boast is hospitality, and be vigilant lest the hatred and bigotry that has haunted us in the past will embarrass us again.
