Making Room to Welcome María, José and Jesús
by Fr. Roger Landry - December 24, 2008
For the last nine days, Hispanic Catholics in our diocese and across the country have been celebrating "las posadas." This is an annual novena, begun in Mexico and now observed throughout much of Latin American, in which pilgrims, following in the footsteps of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, wander from home to home seeking a place to stay. The word "posada" is the Spanish term for "inn." In the tradition, from December 16th through the 24th, groups of children and adults go from door to door singing hymns, carrying candles and statues of Joseph and Mary, and requesting a place to stay. At each house, the owner refuses, until the fatigued travelers arrive at the place designated for a celebration — often a Church — where Mary and Joseph are recognized and allowed to enter. There the night ends by singing traditional Christmas hymns around a carefully-prepared crèche. The whole tradition is meant to help Christians relive the experience of rejection suffered by the Holy Family, so that they might learn to open their hearts, rather than close their doors, to others who come to them seeking assistance.
We might say that the "posadas" are an apt image to describe the experience of so many Hispanic faithful with regard to immigration here in the United States. They knock on the door and, rather than experience welcome, far too many experience rejection.
This is what prompted Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock to write a challenging Advent pastoral letter entitled, I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me. In the introduction, he reminded the faithful of his diocese, "Advent is a time of longing and expectation, a time of hope. Mary and Joseph found no warm welcome in Bethlehem, no room in the inn, but they trusted in God's providence and Mary gave birth to Christ our Hope.… This same Jesus will later declare that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters we do to him. Does Jesus find a warm welcome in our communities? What changes do we need to make here … in order to ensure that today's Marys and Josephs — today's Marías and Josés — receive a warm welcome truly worthy of the Savior whose birth we celebrate on Christmas?"
The experience of the Holy Family's being refugees occurred more than just in Bethlehem. "Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth at the time Jesus was conceived," Bishop Taylor continued, "but were apparently not citizens of Galilee, which would explain why they had to go to Bethlehem in Judea for the census. They were refugees in Egypt, having crossed the border without the permission of the government that they were fleeing and they eventually settled in Galilee once it became apparent that the new government of King Archelaus in Judea was no better than that of his deceased father, King Herod."
The experience of immigration, the Little Rock prelate said, is a constitutive part of salvation history and God has shown himself to be the guide and protector of those who are migrating. Bishop Taylor calls the "God of the Bible" a "God of immigrants" and then marshals his evidence. "The history of salvation unfolds largely in the context of immigration: God called Abraham and Sarah to emigrate from their homeland and led them on a journey that ended with them settling as immigrants in Canaan. Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt and later made arrangements for the immigration of his entire extended family in a time of famine. God called Moses to lead the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and made a covenant with them in the desert en route to a new land he had promised them. God later brought his people back to Israel from exile in Babylon, but in the subsequent centuries the Jewish people continued to migrate to cities throughout the ancient world in a diaspora scattered among the nations, sometimes due to poverty or persecution and sometimes in search of better opportunities."
So in his pastoral letter, Bishop Taylor begins, first, by reminding the Catholic faithful of his Diocese about their spiritual roots and salvation history. Then, with equal force, he reminds them and us of our own family trees and national history.
"One of the constant features of American history," he wrote, "is the fact of immigration and the process of conversion whereby the receiving population learns to soften its heart and open its arms to welcome the newcomer. As we have seen with the earlier waves of Irish, German, Italian and Eastern European immigrants, this process takes time — time for the immigrants to assimilate and time for the receiving population to become comfortable with the newcomers. The ancestors of today's Americans faced and overcame many of the same obstacles that now confront today's immigrants. We are astonished today to read of the mean spiritedness of the 'Irish need not apply' signs that greeted the Irish Catholic immigrants of the 1800s. But we are also edified by the poem by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty which concludes with the words: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" The Statue of Liberty still stands with lamp lifted as a symbol of hope to the poor and huddled masses of today, and Bishop Taylor is calling all of us not to forget those words at the Statue's, and our country's, foundation.
He also does a powerful and penetrating analysis of the Declaration of Independence's most famous phrase: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In that sentence, our founders for us profess that it's obvious that all of us — citizen and immigrant, whether legal or illegal — have all been created equal by God. We declare that we have all been blessed by God with rights that cannot be taken away by any government. Jefferson specified three of those rights, implying obviously that there were others. Bishop Taylor then describes what needs to be our response to the inalienable rights of immigrants toward life, freedom, and the desire for happiness. The immigrants are coming to the United States in search of a better for life, in search of happiness for them and their families, in search of freedom from poverty and often inept, corrupt and dictatorial governments.
Bishop Taylor then tackles head-on one of the most common misconceptions in the debate between "legal" and "illegal" immigration today. "Most Americans," he said, "do not realize the impossible barriers placed on people who want to enter our country legally. Do you know that it is virtually impossible for Mexicans to immigrate to the United States legally unless they already have close relatives who are American citizens? Do you know that there is presently up to a 16-year wait for these family reunification visas because no more than 26,000 family-sponsored visas are allotted to Mexican immigrants in any given year? Virtually all of these are adjustments of status for persons who are already in fact present inside the United States. There are, in fact, virtually no visas available for the more than 500,000 immigrants who enter the U.S. from Mexico each year." The lack of available visas obviously fuels people who would want to come here legally to cross the border illegally.
As we prepare to celebrate Christmas, it's important for us to examine how we would have responded had if a man with a young pregnant woman on a donkey had knocked on our door in Bethlehem. If we would have responded with hospitality then, Bishop Taylor argues, we need to open our hearts now when María and José come knocking on our borders.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
