RPI speaker: Use faith, history as guides on mass migration

Principles from the Church’s social teaching, plus historical experience, will help people form “a more detached spiritual view without being one of the players in the territorial political game,” said Father Bernard Mulcahy, OP, speaking at the Catholic ministry center on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus on April 8.

As society struggles to care for today’s immigrants with dignity and diligence, a priest-scholar told a local audience last week that faith can improve our decisions even though “there isn’t a very elaborate Catholic moral theology about migration.”

Principles from the Church’s social teaching, plus historical experience, will help people form “a more detached spiritual view without being one of the players in the territorial political game,” said Father Bernard Mulcahy, OP, speaking at the Catholic ministry center on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus on April 8.

Father Mulcahy, a Dominican priest and seminary professor in Columbus, Ohio, kicked off a series of talks on current policy issues hosted by Rensselaer Newman, which reaches out to students and others in the RPI community in Troy.

The Church has always preached love for the strangers among us based on Jesus’ own words; various areas of moral theology go into more details than this principle about migration, Father Mulcahy said. The call for charity will be fleshed out further as we confront economic, political and other factors affecting immigrants in national and global contexts.

People have crossed borders for millennia, he noted. As a rolling average, roughly 4 percent of the human race “has been on the move” during any given period “since prehistoric times.” We now think of these travelers in such categories as migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers and victims of human trafficking.

One more recent complication is extra mobility — people “moving at a faster pace.” Moral approaches which long have held true must be nimble, broad and detailed, understanding the context in the countries where migrants are in motion, carrying their desires for safety and sharing aspirations for a better life.

The work of theologians, by its nature, develops more slowly than the controversies in society, said Father Mulcahy, a native New Yorker who holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the Australian Catholic University.

The Church’s discernment on migration is evolving while holding true to basics. Its enduring insights into this topic and related guidelines — human dignity, the common good, faithful deliberation, respect for culture, and tackling challenges at the local level, not only as general concepts — help to reflect on today’s trends, he said.

Also, Catholicism itself has experienced practical challenges first-hand. Popes have faced territorial migration and even invasion, Father Mulcahy pointed out. The Church was sovereign over the Papal States from 756 to 1870.

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) famously influenced the secular world by applying Catholic social doctrine to insist on justice for workers as they confronted dehumanizing jobs and living standards during the Industrial Revolution.

After the RPI presentation, Father Jordan Lenaghan, OP, joined the discussion. He is chaplain of Rensselaer Newman, as well as parochial vicar of Christ Sun of Justice Parish, which Father Thomas Morette serves as pastor. A network of Newman Centers ministers to Catholics on numerous college campuses around the country.

Father Lenaghan thanked his fellow Dominican for explaining the complexity of immigration issues — one of the policy areas where conversation is often politicized and dominated by “those who want to oversimplify what the Church teaches.”

He said Catholic wisdom will continue to “respond to emergent situations.”

Drawing upon Scripture and an “understanding of the person of Jesus,” as well as engaging with history and current culture, the Church “creates the lines on the field,” Father Lenaghan said. And it’s within those lines that “theologians and believers reflect on, discuss, debate and pray about what this all means.”