SUBIACO ABBEY BLOG: Love and the Border!

The influx of refugee children from Central America at our southern border has caused an outcry and a crisis. The vision of the hungry, bewildered, desperate children on our TV screens has overwhelmed us.

A crisis reveals our priorities. When our house is on fire, what we grab tells us something about who we are at that moment. The axiom of Steven Covey is very biblical: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”

If our only view of the events is from the media, we have looked at this crisis in political terms: It is against the law. Our government and the other governments are at fault, and the parents of the children are at fault. We need to send the children back and teach the governments and the parents a lesson. We need to secure our borders.

It is a serious political issue, all right, but while we are stewing in our self-righteous anger, the children are hungry, sick, and fearful. Our first view should be of the needy children. As Christians we have a clear priority: take care of those in need first and then sort out who or what is right or wrong. These children are not our enemies, but even if they were: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty give him something to drink” (Rom 12:20).

Catholic religious leaders have joined other religious leaders in a statement to the President and Congress, emphasizing that “This is a regional humanitarian crisis, not a U.S. immigration enforcement problem.” Individual Bishops, including our own Bishop Anthony Taylor, have issued statements as well.

Bishop Taylor has a special vantage point to understand the situation in his role on the Bishops’ Committee on Migration in which he made a recent trip to El Salvador with an assessment team. The view from the States, where parents have many options for their children, is that the parents of the refugees are heartless in exposing their children to a thousand miles of dangerous travel. But Bishop Taylor has found that in their society at this time, those parents have only two options for their children, life and death, and they are making a desperate act of love to save their children’s lives.

“How hard it must be,” he says, “ for parents to reach the point of realizing that the only chance their children have for escaping violence and possible death is to put money in their hands and send them north, even at the cost of possibly never seeing them again.”

So they are not sending their children out of heartlessness, but in desperate love, “but also with the hope that our hearts might be moved to help their children have a chance for a better life.” The love from the south is crying out for love from the north.

Bishop Taylor’s insightful and impassioned letter may be found on the Diocese’s website: www.dolr.org.