Unexpectedly, neighbors came knocking at the door of the Diocese of Sacramento Pastoral Center last Friday, June 2. Young women and men, mostly from Venezuela and Colombia, had been picked up in El Paso, Tex., and flown across the country on private jets paid for by the state of Florida. They now stood dazed and unaware of where they had been shuttled. When I visited with them the following Monday, the sense of geographic and emotional vertigo was still on their faces.
I listened to stories of the journey. Mentions of the “tren” referred to the notorious bestia that thrumbles north through Mexico, ladened with human cargo headed to the border. Some were quick to unburden themselves of the miles of accumulated misery that brought them to the northern end of California’s Central Valley. For others, their silence spoke. What could not be said haunted the gathering.
“Reality is greater than ideas,” Pope Francis taught us in his first apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium” (Nos. 231-3). As I sat in the room with the migrants, the Holy Father’s sober wisdom came to mind. Our neighbors brought seemingly distant realities very close. Suddenly, solidarity had to be practical and personal. They have traveled far for this awkward encounter. Their continental migration presented the complex, troubling realities of many brothers and sisters in the vast neighborhood called America.
What is transpiring in Sacramento is part of a long, sorrowful litany of migrants being shuffled around as fodder for the propaganda of feeble, failed ideas. The rhetoric of blame bellows from coast to coast. Bipartisan indifference leaves a tattered immigration system to unravel even more. Immigration reform has been postponed by seven consecutive administrations. The rule of law, national sovereignty and security are essential principles for an effective immigration reform, but they must also respond to the larger realities we see.
Pope Francis warned of ideas becoming detached from realities (“Evangelii Gaudium,” No. 231). The Catholic voice should not cower from the unfolding farcical political theater of immigration folly. We must engage from the realities—both human and divine—that we see and serve, believing in the prudent sober truth that “realities are greater than ideas.”
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The Most. Rev. Jaime Soto is the bishop of the Diocese of Sacramento and the chair of the board of directors for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC).
With thanks to America, where this article originally appeared.