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National Conference for Seminarians in Hispanic Ministry
By Fr. Dennis | October 23, 2007
This past weekend, I attended the National Conference for Seminarians in Hispanic Ministry at St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a good conference, and the people there were great. About 75 seminarians from around the country, plus the seminarians of St. Paul Seminary, attended the conference.
The presenters were fine, but one of the most important ideas I walked away with was the idea that Hispanic parishioners need to have an emergency plan in place to help one another. Some times, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement people will take a mom or a dad, and they person taken will have no means of communicating with the family. The family should have a plan in place:
- Who will take care of the kids?
- Where is the financial information?
- How will people get in touch with each other?
- How can the parish or other parishioners help each other?
For people living in the murky world of the undocumented, such a plan is as important as having a will.
While I won’t be attending next year’s conference, it should be excellent! It will take place at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Mexico City!
I also had a chance to meet up with some seminarians I had not seen since I attended the Institute for Priestly Formation back in 2004. They’re all deacons already. But my day comes soon.
Click here to see all the photos I snapped.
Topics: Latinos, Seminary Life |
October 24th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Nice pictures! I grew up just down the street on at St. Clair and Cretin. Used to play in the caves at the seminary.
My Dad’s funeral, just a few years ago, was at the Cathedral. Nothing else would do for a big Italian funeral!
October 24th, 2007 at 6:04 am
The best emergency plan would be to take the family back to Mexico and apply for legal entry into the US.
However, I suspect the conference followed the rationale of “they’re going to do it anyway, so we might as well make it safe”–the same rationale that’s used to distribute birth control to teenagers. It’s wrong but…
We tell teenagers not to indulge their urges until married. We tell Mexicans to indulge their illicit desires but to play it safe.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Bill, I think you are confusing illicit and immoral, or you are confusing US law with Divine Law. Unmarried teens having sex is immoral and violates God’s Divine and Natural Law. People living in the US without permission does not violate God’s Divine and Natural Law. It merely violates US law. And one could make the case fairly easily that US immigration laws are not, in fact, in harmony with God’s Divine and Natural Law.
Before you call something illicit, I would encourage you to read the teachings of the Church regarding the natural rights of human persons, and specifically the rights of migrants as human persons.
Try Pope John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, paragraph 77. It’s true that this document is an exhortation, and not a definitive statement of the faith. That means that the pope intends to make his point by the persuasiveness of his argument, rather than by appealing to his own authority as pontiff. But his argument is well-reasoned.
If the ministry of the Church were only open to non-criminals, ministry would be much easier. But as it is, the Church must minister to criminals and non-criminals, legal residents and illegal residents, alike. And helping preserve families trumps helping to enforce immoral immigration laws.
October 24th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Actually, you are both correct to a degree.
When persons are unable to find work and support themselves and their families, they have a right to migrate to other countries and work. This right is not absolute, as stated by Pope John XXIII, when
he said this right to emigrate applies when “there are just reasons for it.”
At the same time the Church “recognizes the right of the sovereign to protect and control its borders in the service of the common good of its citizens”.
I’m afraid there are many illegals that do abuse the system. By correcting the laws on the books, perhaps setting a quota for orderly immigration, some of these folks could be weeded out.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
BUT, whether here legally or illegally, they are God’s children who need the ministries of the church.
October 24th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Adrienne’s right. The teaching of the Catholic Church (which is frequently at odds with the teaching of the Catholic clergy) is that nations have a right to control their borders and immigration into their countries.
Given that the United States has the most expansive and generous immigration policy in history, I’m not quite sure where you get off calling US law immoral and therefore negated by Divine Law. I think you’ve been more informed by left-wing rhetoric on the issue than any divine teaching.
October 24th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Sorry, WF is me. It’s my other screen name.
October 24th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
OK, the WF comment didn’t post. I’ll pick this up later.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Oh my gosh, Bill, I didn’t mean to start WWIII here. Such a hot topic. What fun!
October 24th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Perhaps you did not intend to start WWIII, but Bill likes a good scrap.
When referring to our current US laws as being immoral, I was meaning that its immoral in its enforcement. People are picked up, detained, and “repatriated” without the chance to contact family and let them know what’s going on. It’s not like you get a court date and have time to arrange your affairs. You’re picked up and you’re gone. Vanished.
That harms families. That part of the way we do things in America needs to be changed.
While we’re at it, all the data suggests that our economy is not failing because of the steady stream of immigrants, but rather the opposite. If that’s true, that would suggest our nation has a greater capacity to accept newcomers than the current law admits. Meanwhile, lots and lots of newcomers arrive without being identified.
The solution is twofold. Open up the quotas to allow more people, even people who might be classified as “unskilled,” and at the same time, increase efforts to document who is already here.
In the scenario I’ve laid out, we would have the people our economy seems to need in order to get all the work done, and we would be MORE secure because everyone would be identified on the way in.
As an added benefit, we would put the coyotes almost completely out of work. That human smuggling thing is completely tainted and corrupt.
So, to wrap up, I want the law changed, and in the meantime I want to help protect families from the kind of trauma that can happen as a result of bad laws.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Well, actually, Dennis — your scenario is not always the way it is. Many states have a policy of picking up the illegals, booking them, giving them a court date and then letting them go. Of course, they never come to court which is kinda’ the intention.
Does the other scenario happen?? Sure, but not as often as someone is leading you to believe. We don’t even have the resources to do that.
October 24th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Adrienne,
Can you substantiate both of your propositions with data and information from reliable sources? You’re making statement as fact that I’m not familiar with - although that doesn’t make them wrong or suspect, but I like to be able to go to the source, so to speak. Got anything there?
October 24th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Dennis,
The only way for an illegal immigrant to be picked up, detained and repatriated is for him to have broken the law and come here illegally in the first place. If he hadn’t come here, he couldn’t be picked up, etc. Which makes him a human being who has made a decision to break the law and run the risk of detention and deportation–and he is the first cause and moral agent in that chain of events not the US Government. The US does not detain and deport Mexicans who stay in Mexico. It responds to decisions by competent adults fully aware of the consequences who break the law in its region of sovereignty. The illegal immigrant is a rational player, not merely a hapless victim of circumstance.
Interestingly enough, this same process of detaining and deporting would happen to the illegal immigrant in every other country in the world including Vatican City. And yet no one has denounced either the Vatican or Italy for not allowing millions of Mexicans to come work in Rome.
Canada’s not taking a zillion Mexicans. Neither is Australia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Japan or Norway. Why is it that only the US is guilty of this supposedly heinous immorality? Aren’t all of the other countries morally bound to send the necessary transportation to bring an overwhelming horde of foreigners into their countries? Why does merely bordering Mexico make us responsible for taking them all in? And if bordering the country somehow invokes a grave moral obligation, why can’t they go south into Central and South America?
The arguments of the bishops are first and foremost patronizing to the very people they say they are advocating for. They are not helpless victims or incompetents who need the protection of the Church. They left their country not because of political persecution or the inability to obtain the daily necessities of life–they left because they can find better jobs in the US. While laudable in that they want to better themselves and their families it is nowhere near warranting the pious moralizing, patronizing, and “violation of Divine Law” hyperbole being spewed forth by the usual left-wing clerical suspects.
I don’t have anything against Mexicans. And I do think we need and even more generous immigration policy than what we have, but what we have in no way even begins to violate “Divine Law.”
October 24th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Oh, now, Bill, I was very careful with my words. I said the US laws were not in harmony with Divine Law. I did not say they were a violation of it. I’m suggesting that it’s out of tune. That it could be better than it is. Human law should be modeled after Divine Law as much as possible.
I think I’ve already explained that, as a statute, being in the US without permission rises to the same level of offense as a traffic violation.
You can say “violation of national sovereignty” all day, but at the end of the day, it’s not much more serious than speeding.
Of course, now you’ll accuse me of condoning speeding. Which I don’t. Though I’m not perfect in observing that law myself.
And, just so you know, the one time I met a woman in Mexico who was planning to cross into the US illegally, I actually did advise her not to do it.
On the other hand, unmarried teens having sex does violate Divine Law in a way that speeding or violating a national border without permission does not. They’re not really the same thing.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Adrienne, I got the scenario anecdotally from a priest in St. Paul who said it happens and has happened to his parishioners. It’s something that wasn’t really on my radar before that. Other people at the conference told me it happens, but that it doesn’t get reported by the media because they’re not that interested. So, who knows? I don’t doubt the priest, since he went to the trouble to have workshops in his parish.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:30 am
http://www.wtov9.com/news/5351278/detail.html
http://www.lulac.org/advocacy/alerts/stop.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/13/AR2006051301173.html
These are all articles referring to what is known as “catch and release”. The last on is rather old (2001) but gives and idea of how it works.
I believe there are certain cities that have openly declared themselves to be safe cities. I’m pretty sure New York has declared itself safe. I’ll do some checking around in my “spare” time to see what’s up with that….
And gosh, Dennis, I know that folks do get picked up and it creates a bad situation but we still have to look at personal responsibility for getting themselves in that position.
So many of these people are not living in conditions that would justify coming here without papers. We have become a world where living without a plasma tv is considered poor.
I would much rather see us as do something to help these people build a better life in their own country rather than come here where most will be doomed to life as a second class citizens.