By Patrick Schmadeke
Evangelization in the World Today
The Spring semester of 2008 had unfolded much like other semesters. By that time, my junior year of high school, I pretty much had gotten the hang of things (at least as much as one can in the tumultuous, unpredictable years of high school). In the regular course of classes, my brother and I were not about to pass up an extra credit opportunity for Spanish class by attending Mass in Spanish at a nearby parish, Queen of Peace in Waterloo, Iowa.
During Mass, we learned of the raids by U.S. Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) authorities that had taken place at the meatpacking plant in Postville, a mere 90 minutes away, where nearly 400 Latino men and women had been arrested. The priest invited Mass attendees to join a march in response to the ICE raid. As we approached him after Mass to get his signature on our parish bulletin, a requirement to receive extra credit for class, he invited us to join the march. We declined, but our interest was piqued.
Later, we hopped on our bikes and rode down to the Cattle Congress where the detainees were being held. What stuck in my memory were the rows of temporary trailers inside the cattle yard. Whether these trailers were for housing, courtrooms or something else I did not know, but the irony of this living metaphor was clear: humans were being stored in cattle pens.
Seventeen-year-old me had probably never heard of ICE, I had never seriously contemplated the complexities of immigration and until then, no one had ever invited me to participate in a protest. I had no idea what the future held for those detained or what could be done about it. At that time, I did not know how to process what I had seen.
I came across photos from the event as I was writing this column. One photo of a marcher was a high school classmate. As I look at the photo now, I see deep pain in her eyes. I wish that she did not have to experience this pain.
In dialogue about immigration, we often hear the story about how the Holy Family once had to migrate, fleeing for their lives. We also hear and read that the Catholic Church in the U.S. is a Church of immigrants — Irish, Italian, French, German, Polish, Slavic and Czech, to name a few.
Our story as immigrants is a story of being unwelcome. At one point, the Christmas holiday, a “papist” and “unbiblical” holiday, was even outlawed in some locals. Our country has come a long way since then. The raids in Postville in 2008, the arrests and deportations of immigrants without documents over the last several years and the heightened emphasis today on deportation of immigrants suggests that we have a long way to go. We have not yet internalized the self-awareness to achieve or at least to move incrementally in the direction of the moral conversation the Gospel summons us to. We cannot avoid Jesus’ words: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV established Dec. 12 as the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and in 1999, St. John Paul II declared her Patroness of the Americas. Our faith calls us to scrutinize the signs of the times in light of the Gospel. Our Lady of Guadalupe can be an incisive instrument in such discernment.
I don’t think Our Lady would want her children stored in cattle pens.
(Patrick Schmadeke is director of evangelization for the Diocese of Davenport.)
