Pierangelo Sequeri is worth listening to. He wrote some of the most beautiful and profound religious songs in Italian—Symbolum '77 ("Tu sei la mia vita, altro io non ho…"), Symbolum '80 ("Oltre la memoria del tempo che ho vissuto…"), Madre io vorrei, and others. He was close for many years to Cardinal Martini, the archbishop of Milan, and deeply connected to Fede e Luce communities. He is rector of the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.
Sequeri cuts through the usual argument. He refuses to line up on either side—"We don't want them" or "We have a moral duty to welcome them." Instead, he names the deeper, usually unspoken reasons we react as we do to migrants, and traces them to the shape of our society and our Church. What follows is drawn from remarks he made at a Roman parish in February.
More Than Mere Survival
Start with something universal: a human being tries to establish a good relationship with the world. One way is through travel—it enriches the life of the traveler, those he meets, and his home when he returns.
Travel is a choice. Migration is forced travel. It happens when the place where you live no longer allows a good relationship with the world. So you leave because you know survival itself is no longer possible there—and that place has no chance to be enriched by your staying. This may not be permanent, but now you are at the edge of survival. War, famine, poverty—it doesn't matter which. Poverty is as lethal as war to those born into it. We should ask ourselves too: what made that homeland unlivable? Drought, perhaps. The violence of neighbors. Generations of outsiders who came and took but gave nothing back.
Here is where we contradict ourselves. We say we will accept the persecuted migrant—though even that is uncertain among us. But we reject the one who comes seeking a better life for himself and his children. We claim to believe it is right and good to work for your children's future, far beyond mere survival. Yet how can we be so cynical as to condemn in others what we hold as a good for ourselves? To want, for yourself and your children, something more than not dying?
Bread Given With Contempt
Now look at another side of this.
We live on a planet where every plot of earth, every plant, every spring belongs to someone. A few generations ago, you could farm a patch, build a cottage to live in. Today, even if you and your family are willing to sacrifice, someone arrives with a bill: so much to the municipality; so much to the owner; this land is uncultivated but you cannot work it. It's the same in the small town, the city, the region, the world.
There is almost nothing that cannot be bought and sold, nothing tied to human work rather than some permit. Rules and technology have freed us from many worries. But they fix in place every thing that can or cannot be done. We are losing the sense of how resources become human. If I throw you bread with contempt or hand it to you with kindness, the nutrition is the same. But in the first case I open a chasm in your life.
They say: there is no work here! But work is the human being. Yes, but here everything is already sold, measured, bought.
The right to education? To healthcare? Sure—but the money ran out.
Intimacy and Citizenship
Two dimensions we once knew well are short-circuiting today: familiarità—the bond with relatives, neighbors, friends, where we feel safe—and "citizenship," the wider community we belong to, which today seems to be just paperwork. So welcoming someone into citizenship feels like a matter of bureaucracy. We tolerate poorly a citizenship without human faces. And as a natural reaction, welcoming someone into the family sphere makes us uneasy. It carries history, tradition. It does not admit the intrusion of strangers.
In our ancient culture—even our Christian culture—there was a formalized figure with a role both institutional and familial, a bridge between these two spheres: the guest (it was a precise term). The family and the city together took care of him. When a stranger arrived, the city itself would propose him to a family to welcome him. And the family knew this welcome was protected by "the state"—by citizenship. Without that protection, people's fears and doubts are not mere anxieties.
Find Just Paths
The guest carries within him this problem: no one quite knows who he is. This becomes the problem too of those who receive him. It can be solved only if family and polity recognize it and create a path supported by both, where the problem can be resolved. It would take too long to work out what that path should be—certainly it includes help learning the language. The ability to communicate eases the guest's discomfort and the host's anxiety. Human beings, speaking to each other, understand many things that are never stated.
What we need is to recognize migration as a social institution alongside family and citizenship. We need to recognize and carry out the adoption of the migrant by this land, since his "mother" land can no longer sustain him. If we treat migration instead as a struggle over citizenship, as competition for "space," we will go nowhere.
Facing forced displacement—something visited first on "them"—with our Christian values of welcome, we cannot simply turn it into forced insertion. We must give a testimony of hospitality that encourages the creation of middle paths toward this "adoption." That does not mean holding young people for three months, six months, a year, doing nothing, with no minimum of purpose.
We measure human reaction at the level of survival. Our materialist society drives us to this: we think of ourselves as clever insects scrounging for better food. But we are not insects. We live by conversation, by dreams, by looks.
We risk forgetting what moves or silences a human being, what angers or shakes him. It is not so much the bread. It is the way we give it. We are sensitive to the manner in which we live on the earth, the way we eat, the way we make children—the "how" of things. This is universal. Human beings recognize themselves in this. And it is profoundly human to wish to be useful to the community, to speak with the people who dwell there. So the satisfaction of learning the language to be understood and to understand.
How We Are
Now the argument turns back to us.
We are building a social system in which we are losing human resources—the incentive to cultivate human qualities in our bonds, the sense of community. For the last couple of decades, the idea has grown that society is made of individuals with the right to secure the best advantages for themselves, and society organizes itself to give them. This kind of society has no room not only to welcome migrants, but also for social bonds, family bonds—which often become conflicts. We lose the sense that our good depends not so much on our share of money as on the share of affections we develop for the community we belong to. Those affections are a resource for everyone.
The Church runs a risk here too. It tends to lean on a model of Christian community where the guest does not exist.
Hospitality is a category we have lost touch with. We preach it, but we don't know how to practice it. Many parishes have been generous in emergencies. But we lack the cultural equipment, a "form of church." We are not used to a Church that belongs to everyone and holds everything.
The Gospel shows us the original model of the Church. It has three essential elements: Jesus, the disciples, the crowd. If Jesus is missing, the Church becomes some who command and the people who obey—and then it is finished. If you remove the disciples who teach what Jesus taught, you have a crowd of fanatics who see Jesus everywhere. There are no mediators, and everyone can say "I am Jesus." If the crowd is missing, the Church becomes a sect: a founder and a clique of loyalists who know everything.
In the crowd there is everything: the heretic (the Samaritan), the one who goes to the temple every day, the tax collector (he works with money), the prostitute, the foreign woman from Sidon, the sick. To this crowd of guests, Jesus speaks in parables. The crowd understands and follows him.
The Church has lost the habit of hospitality because in everything it does, there are only its own. It must regain familiarity with the genius of Christian hospitality—without confusing the levels (crowd, disciples, Jesus)—each with its own part.
Edited by Sergio Sciascia, 2017