I am writing this message on Laetare Sunday. Today’s readings emphasize the gratuitousness of God’s act of love in sending the only Son out of love for us. The readings also express our sense of exile when we are separated from God’s love. In that exile is a longing to return. The Good News is that the gift of God’s only begotten Son makes this return possible, without condition. When we embrace it, the gift of homecoming is ours. This is reason to Rejoice!
We have just marked a year since the coronavirus changed our lives. In a sense, we have known something of what it is like to live in exile, separated from what we hold dear, the relationships, places, and ways of being that shape our very identity. This sense of exile is not entirely a new experience for us, though it may be remote. As a nation of immigrants, all of us bear an ancestral memory of exile from our homeland. This past year has forced us to tap into that experience once again. Understanding its impact helps us to understand the value of the work that we accomplish together through your support of the Congar Institute. It has to do with the central role the Catholic Church plays in the lives of immigrants in this country.
For many Hispanic immigrants, the Catholic Church is a safe harbor in a strange land, the only part of home they can connect to in their adopted land. Even if it wasn’t central to their lives back home, it is familiar. There they encounter others like themselves. They can usually find welcome and they do not have to fear being looked down upon or, worse, being unseen. They can express aspects of their cultural identity in familiar rituals. They may have the opportunity to exercise their full abilities as capable adults in contrast to the humiliating limitations in the workplace and in society that come with starting anew in a second language. Together, we assist the Church to call forth leaders from among the people, to offer them a deeper education in their faith and development of their leadership abilities that they may have no other means to access. In turn, they assist the Church to be present to so many who are here, searching warily for just that kind of connection. Through these leaders, the Church comes to them in their exile, looking like them, speaking their language, extending a kind hand of welcome, and seeing them for who they are. This is reason to Rejoice!