ON THE BORDER WITH OUR UNDOCUMENTED
BROTHERS and
SISTERS
Cardinal Roger Mahony
February 18, 2016
AT
THE US-MEXICO BORDER, EL PASO – When the visit of Pope Francis to Mexico
reached its close with his February 17th Mass at Ciudad Juarez, I could’ve had the privilege to cross
the border and concelebrate with him.
Instead, however, I chose to remain on the Texas side and take part in
this historic “liturgy of two nations” with a large number of undocumented
people who could not legally cross over to join our Holy Father, but who were
able to witness the moment as the first son of immigrants to become Bishop of
Rome stretched his hand over the Rio Grande to bless them on US soil. It was an overwhelming experience!
But
before that memorable Wednesday afternoon, I was blessed to spend time with a
large number of young people who were present as “unaccompanied minors” – a nice
way of saying that they had endured weeks and months of anguish, attacks,
deprivations, and threats to reach our country.
I met with about 40 of them in El Paso before the Pope arrived. The majority were from Guatemala, Honduras
and El Salvador.
These
were young men, 16 to 22 years old, but they all looked like children. When I asked them to tell me their stories,
they told me of how they had been sent on their journeys alone by their
parents, because the options for them back home were so bleak. If they didn’t take the risk to seek a new
life elsewhere, they said that all of them would have been forced into criminal
gangs in one way or the other, and they would have been made to kill and maim
others for the survival of the gang.
It’s
frightening when the only future ahead of you would be to capitulate to the
horror and the treachery of lawlessness in your homeland. Instead, the parents of these men were strong
enough to force them to leave behind everything they knew, and to travel “al norte” – to the north – in the hope
of something better. At great sacrifice
and with a lot of money – money they couldn’t afford – they sent their sons and
daughters across the the only possible route to the US: the border between
Guatemala and Mexico.
It was a moving grace
to meet with these courageous young people, to come to know them, and to listen
to their stories. The only way they
survived traveling north through Mexico was meeting one or two others on the
same journey. As they described it, they
became compadres – brothers
and sisters on a common journey – and endured incredible obstacles: drug lords
controlled most of the territory they had to travel, and they were attacked,
threatened, and humiliated every mile of the trip – a journey of many
weeks. Often, and in more ways than one,
they faced death, whether from trying to jump onto moving trains or from a lack
of food and water. But the most
frequent, and painful, reason why their lives were in danger was the lack of
anyone who cared for them.
These men arrived at
our border not as criminals, but as desperate souls and children of God. All they came seeking was a future free from
the crime, injustice, and slavery of being pawns in an empire of what Pope
Francis calls “modern slavery”: the twin evils of drug and human trafficking
which are destroying countless lives and communities in Central America.
In the 25th chapter of
Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that “whatever you did for these least
brothers of mine, you did for me,” and by that standard we will be judged. Today, what we do for these men and those
like them is what we do for the Lord himself.
It was a special grace
to be with these sisters and brothers of ours on the border, within eyesight of
the Pope’s final Mass in Mexico. We may
have been physically divided from Juarez by the pathetic Rio Grande, guarded by
the Border Patrol officers
everywhere around, but in something no human obstacle can restrict – the
Eucharist and the love of Christ – we were one.
When Pope Francis
walked up the ramp to the shrine and prayed in grief for those who have
attempted to better their lives who have crossed the border, these young men
could only view the scene through fencing.
A photo tells the story – the exclusion and distance it represents is
powerful. It is the sign and story of
what the Holy Father has termed “a globalization of indifference.”
But at the very same
moment, another picture told of the hope that can overcome it: three of these
men, offering a salute and exchange of fraternity from the North to the South. In this, we see the Pope’s constant reminder
that all of us are brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, and that – both as a
church and society – as he said during his US visit last year, the mission the
Lord entrusts to us is “is not about building walls, but about breaking them
down.”
I returned to Los
Angles with a renewed enthusiasm to walk the journey of peace, fraternity, and
well-being for all of our brothers and sisters who have endured, and are now
enduring, the fences that separate us.
May the Lord, and Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of America, bless and
strengthen us in our task.
