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ShareLady Liberty has seen many tempest tossed generations set foot upon these shores. With each new wave of immigrants, the American Catholic Church has become a harbor that gets wider and deeper by the year.
Immigrants today experience economic, social, legal, and pyschological crucifixions.
Last April I was working on a video documentary on the U.S.-Mexican border. It was Holy Week. Each day I talked with undocumented immigrants, church workers, coyote smugglers, and border patrol agents, trying to capture something of the complex and painful drama of illegal immigration.
Some Catholics aren't so sure about the bishops' push for comprehensive immigration reform, but this Catholic activist says it's time for the entire church to stick up for immigrants.
Sounding Boards are one person's take on a many-sided subject and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of U.S. Catholic, its editors, or the Claretians.
Stephanie Garza, a young new leader in the church, creates leaders out of Chicago moms.
The immigration debate comes home to Catholic parishes
She brought her children here from her country because she feared gangs would kill them.
“I left because of the delinquency of El Salvador. The situation there is very delicate. A mother has instincts toward her children, and, well, I saw a very dangerous future for them,” Maria Ayala says.
The Salvadoran civil war—which killed some 70,000 from 1980 to 1992, including San Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero—spawned gang violence by groups like Mara Salvatrucha.
How to deal with the immigration “problem”? Give people a real choice on migration.
It may surprise red-white-and-blue Americans fixated on preventing the Hispanic reconquista of the Anglo Norte, but many of the folks they howl most about agree with them. They don’t want to come to America any more than these Americans want to let them in.
During Mass each Wednesday at Casa Juan Diego in Houston, immigrants speak of not eating for days, having nothing to drink for a week, seeing people die of thirst or because they drank irrigation water with chemicals in it.
The U.S. should be a good host and protect the migrant workers who knock on our door.
In the colonial period the destitute and desperate escaping the poverty of European backwaters made their way to America as indentured servants, signing away the only commodity they had to offer: themselves. Frequently used up to the end of human endurance by their "employers," these earliest members of America's working class experienced a dehumanization that was only exceeded by the treatment of Africans brought over as slaves.
She is fighting to regain her composure and she is losing. Her narrative halts in midsentence, stalled in a sob, and Lourdes Solorzano's previously calm, confident face disintegrates into a portrait of plain heartache. Her red T-shirt is rhinestoned with the American flag, and she raises it over her mouth in an awkward, embarrassed effort to hide her pain.
In the midst of a heated debate on immigration and a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Bishop Jaime Soto lays out the church's agenda.
Although born in Los Angeles, Bishop Jaime Soto has been stopped several times at airport security. During one such occasion the officer did not want to believe that he was a bishop until he opened his briefcase. He was carrying a Bible and a bottle of whiskey.
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