Pope Leo: US must respect ‘spiritual rights‘ of detainees

‘Jesus says very clearly: At the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him, and welcome him, or not?’

The US authorities must respect the “spiritual rights” of detained migrants, Pope Leo said.

“I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral workers to attend to the needs of those people,” he told reporters as he left Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday.

“Many times they’ve been separated from their families for a good amount of time. No one knows what’s happening, but their own spiritual needs should be attended to.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials at the Broadview Detention Centre in Chicago refused permission for a Catholic group to distribute communion to detainees after a Mass outside on 1 November. They had refused the same request on 11 October.

“In the first place, the role of the Church is to preach the Gospel,” the Pope said. “And just a couple of days ago we heard Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25, [where] Jesus says very clearly: At the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him, and welcome him, or not?”

He said that “many people who have lived [in the US] for years and years and years” were affected by the Trump administration’s deportation raids.

In a response on social media, Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, insisted that religious leaders could request access to ICE facilities “through the proper channels”.

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, whom President Donald Trump appointed to the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission in May, said he was “in touch with senior officials” and “brought forward the concerns of the Church regarding detainees’ access to sacraments”.

“I feel that maintaining open lines of communication and engaging in dialogue with the administration constitute the most constructive way forward,” he said in a social media post on 3 November.

Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, another member of the commission, told the Religion News Service: “It is important that our Catholic detainees are able to receive pastoral care and have access to the sacraments.”

He continued: “Their religious liberty, part of their human dignity, needs to be respected.”

The Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich said that the administration’s anti-immigrant messages were “hypocritical”.

He told the National Catholic Reporter that “the narrative – that this is a matter of law enforcement for those who have broken the law because they have stayed in this country too long, that is the only issue – has to be challenged, because another part of the story is that these people are here not by invasion, but by invitation.

“We wanted them here to pick our produce from the land, to landscape our lawns, to care for our elderly and our children, to work in our restaurants, serve our tables, to clean our rooms. We have needed them as a workforce and these people have worked hard.”

At an interfaith gathering on responses to the immigration crisis last week, a leading Methodist theologian said that St Oscar Romero should be the model for pastors.  

“What made Romero such a prophetic and pastoral preacher was his ability to clearly hear the voice of God both through Scripture and through the people who suffered and to let both illuminate each other with the light of Christ within them,” said Alma Tinoco Ruiz, an academic at Duke Divinity School.

Where have all the ‘illegal’ migrants to the US gone?

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