Here is Oxford church historian, journalist, and Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh at Commonweal on why the pontiff focuses so much on migration:
Yet neither the current scale of the problem nor Francis’s own background is sufficient to grasp why he cares so deeply. Yes, migration is personal for him; and yes, the world’s paralysis on the question cries out for his prophetic voice. But a deeper motive emerges from the more than seven hundred pages of words he has written and spoken on the topic, which the migrants section within the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development has collected on its website. (That section, created in 2018, is the only one in the Vatican that Francis heads personally.) 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. Or, to put it in slightly more ecclesial language, migration in the early twenty-first century is where we find the great hermeneutic question of the Gospel being asked and answered: Mercy or sacrifice? In the borderlands of our globalizing world, God knocks at the door disguised as a foreigner. On our recognition and acceptance of that stranger hangs not just the fate of migrants, but of humanity itself.
And this:
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. The despised “irreligious” foreigner, on the other hand, mediates God’s logic of mercy. By stopping and responding to the suffering stranger, the Good Samaritan triggers a new future for them both—and not only for them.
Francis explores this in chapters 2 and 3 of Fratelli tutti, where he plays with the twin hermeneutics of mercy and sacrifice. The parable of the Good Samaritan presents “the basic decision we need to make in order to rebuild our wounded world,” the pope notes: namely, whether “to include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside.” That choice “places into second place distinctions of function or category (priest or merchant, Jew or Samaritan) leaving essentially only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by.” A new future of fraternity is made possible by those willing to transcend their functions and roles.
This is about more than immigration: it is about salvation. But in the gospels the two are inseparable. In Luke, Christ is born to a refugee couple internally displaced by an imperial power’s bid to tax the poor to pay for the costs of military occupation. In Matthew, it is one of Rome’s proxy rulers, who, driven by insecurity, seeks the death of the Christ child, forcing the Holy Family into exile. In both cases, the story of salvation is played out in a familiar migrant story that sums up the experience of God’s chosen people, who were deported and enslaved.
In both accounts God has entered history as a migrant, and the response to that migrant is what drives the drama of salvation. Rejecting or failing to recognize the stranger impedes the creation of a new future: God cannot make his home among us if we will not let him. Recognition and hospitality have the opposite effect: they open the door to an amazing transformation. John’s Gospel, lacking an infancy narrative, expresses the drama in theological terms. On the one hand, “He was in the world but the world knew him not; he came into his own domain / and his people did not accept him.” On the other: “But to all who did accept him / he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:10–12). Non-recognition and rejection—the logic of sacrifice—keep us stuck in sin and division; recognition and hospitality—the logic of mercy—create a new future.
When Jesus dramatizes the choice in Matthew 25—“I was a stranger and you welcomed me…. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome”—he recounts that all those facing judgment are equally astonished. “But when did we see you a stranger?” they all ask. They are all amazed because none of them had seen God in the stranger, whose divinity was concealed. But all had seen the stranger. It was not what they saw but rather their response to it that differentiated them. This was the same challenge faced by the Levite, the priest, and the Samaritan: They all saw the stricken man well enough, but how did they respond to him? As a person of value in need? Or as someone of no account, who deserved their attention only insofar as he was a potential threat to their comfort or convenience? In other words, did they see him through the hermeneutic of mercy—stopping and responding concretely to a person in need—or the hermeneutic of sacrifice, in which the one in need is ignored, avoided, or cast aside?
The Samaritan’s response triggers a conversion captured in the chapter titles of Fratelli tutti: from “Dark clouds over a closed world” via “A stranger on the road” to “Envisaging and engendering an open world,” “A heart open to the whole world,” and so on. Instead of clinging to one’s identity and tribe, one opens oneself up to another kind of humanity, an authentic universal fraternity in which compassion for all human beings—the foreigner, the stranger, the marginalized, the outsider—becomes the foundation of a new kind of society. In chapter 3 of Fratelli tutti, Francis uses the Greek word ekstasis, the going out of self to find a fuller existence in service to the other, especially the other who is outside our own tribe. “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.”
Fratelli tutti cites an essay by Paul Ricoeur, Le socius et le prochain, which contrasts the “associate” or “partner” with the “neighbor” in the sense Jesus uses the term in the Good Samaritan parable. 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.” The pope calls this exercise of free will a “consciously cultivated fraternity.” It is the choice to move beyond our social role or function (le socius) to make ourselves a neighbor (le prochain). These two categories are not in opposition, but need each other. 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.
The problem comes when an association becomes a defense against the stranger. As Francis puts it: “those capable only of being associates create closed worlds.” When the hermeneutic of sacrifice dominates institutions or associations or the politics of whole nations, they become defensive, geared to exclusion, “closed and self-referential structures” in which the word “neighbour” loses all meaning, as Francis puts it in Fratelli tutti. Once our institutions, including the Church, become safe places we retreat to in order to resist outsiders, they become incapable of growing themselves and of renewing society. As the pope notes of the priest and the Levite in his contemplation of the Good Samaritan: “A believer may be untrue to everything his faith demands of him, and yet think he is close to God and better than others.” Jesus makes clear that there is only one authentic guarantee of fidelity to God, and that is “a way of practising the faith that helps open our hearts to our brothers and sisters.”
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. Emptied of love, such relationships shrivel: they become cold, contractual, conditioned by the logic of the market. What in Catholic social teaching is called the “common good” becomes incoherent or even incomprehensible. Politics swings between a liberal globalism that exists only to further wealth-creating partnerships and a nationalist populism that divides society into “the people” and the elites, patriots and foreigners.
Read the entire piece here.
Read the entire piece here.