VATICAN: Cardinal Czerny: Integrate Ministry for Migrants, Refugees in Local Pastoral Programmes
Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, interim president of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, smiles during a visit with Ukrainian refugees in Barabás, Hungary, March 9, 2022. Cardinal Czerny, serving as special envoy for Pope Francis, visited refugees who are being helped by Caritas and other charities in the town near the Ukrainian border. (CNS photo/courtesy Lambert Attila/Magyar Kurír)
Sr. Jecinter Antoinette Okoth, FSSA
At an international conference on Fratelli Tutti focusing on refugees and migrants, Cardinal Michael Czerny has emphasized the Church’s mission of solidarity and inclusion and advocated for integration of the ministry for displaced persons into local pastoral programmes.
Cardinal Czerny was addressing participants virtually on February 6, at a conference organized by the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue and Islamic Studies (IRDIS) of Tangaza University in Nairobi, Kenya in collaboration with Global Ministries University (GMU), and the Harmony Institute.
“In order to learn from the experience of forcibly displaced people, we need to include the ministry to migrants and refugees in local pastoral programmes. It will be important to train faith ministers for this dialogue, culturally, theologically, pastorally and organizationally,” he said in his key not address.
The Cardinal Prefect underscored that formation for peace can be integrated into regular education or other services since “agent of reconciliation must be close to the people, but not take sides.”
Inclusivity is fundamental to Christian discipleship. It is rooted in the Gospel’s call to love, serve, and welcome all people, especially the marginalized.
Talking to the theme of the three-day conference “Belonging Together: Migrants, Refugees, Displaced People, and Global Solidarity” which stressed that the human family is indivisible, the Cardinal pointed out that the Catholic community is called to serve not just Christians or members of the Catholic but to offer mutual care, solidarity, and foster inclusive communities to all.
“We, in turn, encourage the Catholic community within the refugee body to serve all of their fellow refugees. Some pastors who accompany their flock into exile adapt appropriately; others need help to appreciate the totally new context and new ‘rules of the game,” the member of the Order of the Society of Jesus (SJ) said and warned that “It is not correct, especially in settlements where all are needy, to limit material assistance to one’s own worshipping community. “
Instead, “Our energies should confront all sources of division. Let us respect and care for those excluded of whatever religion, ethnic group or social class.”
When circumstances seem bleak, it requires trust in a higher power for the conviction that things can improve. Hence it is faith that provides the foundation which helps sustain hope to stay optimistic.
While addressing the participants, Cardinal Czerny disclosed the painful experience he had of being a migrant in his early age.
“I was a child migrant-refugee at two and a half years of age, when my family fled Czechoslovakia and arrived in Canada. As I grew up, I became increasingly aware of what most refugees and forced migrants experience: the loss of the original homeland,” he said.
The Prefect expounded that even if life may be satisfactory elsewhere, “there remains that residual reality that refuses to be collapsed into the present: the loss of culture, language, networks of relationships, ways of interacting with nature; the loss of the world in which each of us first learns how to be a graced creature of God.”
In this way he narrated, “A competition develops between past and future, between avoiding assimilation and longing for meaningful integration,. Hence it takes faith to keep one’s hope alive in an eventual healthy balance between the lost and the new; in the long process of healing wounds caused by the direct and structural violence that marks forced displacement, and of learning how to find life-giving hope amid an ever-increasing set of reasons to despair.”
