Migrants, refugees deserve pastoral care, archbishop says

By Laureen McMahon

A parish's act of Christian charity, when it provides asylum for refugees and migrants fleeing persecution, can spin off in many positive directions, said Coadjutor Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, of Vancouver.

Before coming to Vancouver, Archbishop Miller served on the Vatican Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerants, established by Pope John Paul II in 1988 to minister to the spiritual welfare of those how no longer are or who never have been members of a parish.

For a long time now, the archbishop noted, churches in Canada, a nation largely made up of immigrants, have been very aware of the need to provide for people "on the move," whether they are immigrating because they are forced to seek new opportunities for themselves and their family or are fleeing the threat of injury or even death.

When the door is opened to the humanitarian act of welcoming the endangered and dispossessed, it can be a source of new religious vocations which emerge to serve the new immigrant community, the archbishop noted.

"We saw this with the Irish population which brought us many vocations and also with the arrival of the Vietnamese `boat people.' From that community we now have many priests serving the Vietnamese and other communities locally and throughout our country."

Welcoming refugees and immigrants to our shores and helping them settle and integrate into Canadian society also, he added, can help deliver a decisive blow to what has become a world-wide threat of trafficking in humans.

Such trafficking, says Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, CS, Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the Office of the United Nations, has turned into a "multi-billion dollar industry."

In a 2004 address to the UN, the archbishop noted, "Among the violations of migrants' rights, trafficking in humans is the worst."

Traffickers, he added, annually transport 1 million children, women, and men across national borders for the purpose of exploitation. They subject them to slave-like conditions through work, by sexual abuse, and by having to resort to begging, "thus stripping people of their God-given dignity and fuelling instead corruption and organized crime."

A community-inclusive approach to assisting vulnerable displaced people and those who host them can be a winning strategy, contended the archbishop. There must be created in countries which accept refugees an effective outreach to the most isolated and vulnerable.

"In fact," he added, "without this solidarity, the victims escaping violence are at risk from new forms of exploitation and at risk of being deprived of health and education services, housing and employment possibilities."

Some desperate refugees, said Archbishop Tomasi, are tempted to place themselves in the hands of smugglers in order to escape, but simply find themselves confronted with additional difficulties in the countries they manage to reach.

Thus, he noted, they become vulnerable to nefarious attempts to press them into servitude, often sexual.

"The Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerants looks at ways to provide pastoral care for `people on the move,'" Archbishop Miller explained. People on the Move is, in fact, he noted, the name of the magazine published by the Council.

The Council mandate, he added, "covers everything from tourists, to undocumented workers, to those such as refugees who have fled their homes.

"We recognize that so much traditional ministry is planned around a parish which involves a territory and people living in a stable unit. For millions of people around the world, this is not reality, yet they must also be tended to."

Trafficking in humans, said Archbishop Miller, is a "horror; modern day slavery.

"The exploitation of people in vulnerable situations, whether it happens in countries where the traffickers bring in workers for the sex trade or work to promote ways to access sexual services in foreign countries, must be at the forefront of our concerns."