Yet we are commanded to harbor the harborless. We can become personally involved, and we can supply financial support. For instance, a small non-denominational church in Seattle started sponsoring refugees in the 1980s. I remember it well because it was my church. Our pastor arranged with a relief agency to help a Vietnamese family who had survived Pol Pot’s Killing Fields. We also sponsored families from Communist Romania and Communist Poland.
That’s not just an Evangelical thing. Catholics can do it too, especially Catholic parishes that pool their considerable resources.
Of course, in keeping with Chesterton’s famous remark that Catholics agree about everything and only disagree about everything else, it’s worth noting that the question of just how to harbor the harborless has no one-size-fits-all approach. The American episcopacy (and many priests and lay Catholics) are all over the map concerning how the Church should respond to illegal immigrants. Some of the confusion is due to the fact that the question of how the Church should respond is not the same as the question of how Caesar should respond. A priest in Los Angeles is not bound by the question of whether the human being at his door is legal. He is bound by the fact that the human being at his door is Jesus Christ.
At the same time, foolish things have been said to the effect that America is like Nazi Germany for so much as having an immigration policy. This is silly. Every state needs a way of screening out dangers to the common good. So trying to create a workable system of legal immigration is just common sense. No nation on earth has been as welcoming of the stranger as the United States has—a testimony to the penetration of this particular corporal work of mercy into the American psyche. How the struggle over immigration policy will play out, I do not know. But if we follow our historical pattern, we can hope that the stranger from the south will find a welcome as did the stranger from Ireland, southern Europe, and Asia.
Meanwhile, it is not the task of most of us to deal with twelve million illegal aliens. Instead, we can start in much simpler ways by welcoming strangers, whether the literally homeless or the spiritually lonely ones within our own parishes. In my experience, that’s where we lay Catholics can be of huge assistance to the body of Christ.
Spiritual homelessness in one’s own parish is endemic in Catholic America. All over the United States, average Catholics sit as strangers in the pews. “Nobody knows my name. We have no friends here. I come to get my sacrament card punched each Sunday, but I have no living connection to this parish.” Such stories of aching loneliness are heard again and again in parishes around the country. It’s the number one reason ex-Catholics are ex-Catholics. It’s not because of a theological excuse that gets layered on later, such as having read the words “Call no man your father” in Matthew 23:9 and realizing that priests are called “Father.” The real reason is “I was desperately lonely, and this Evangelical coworker invited me to his church. They welcomed me, gave me a place, knew my name, and loved me.”
But Catholics can be welcoming and warm. We too have the ability to open our homes, to invite new folks in the parish over for tea or Sunday dinner. We too can notice gifts and charisms in the lives of newcomers and say, “Hey! You’ve got a good voice! Have you thought about joining the choir?” or “There’s a ladies’ prayer meeting. Want to come?”
All this is part of harboring the harborless. Some will complain that this teaches Catholics to look out only “for their own.” But this is like complaining that fathers and mothers think first of their children before considering their neighbors. The answer is, “What else do you expect?” Of course welcoming the stranger does not stop at our parish doors. But it does start there. And if we cannot welcome the Catholic whom we have seen, how can we welcome the stranger whom we have not seen? So let us begin where we are, doing what is possible first, before beginning where we are not and doing what is extremely difficult. This is the counsel of the gospel itself, which proceeds not from grand utopian schemes but rather from ordinary people doing what they can where they are—eventually building the temple of God made with living stones, in which all the nations of the earth can find a home.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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