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We are here for the opening session of a theological conference on migration, organized on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the visit of Blessed John Baptist Scalabrini, by the two North American Provinces of the Missionaries of St Charles, the religious Congregation founded by him to respond to the special needs of the emigrants. I wish to share with you what we Scalabrinians value as our Founder’s legacy, in the pastoral work for migrants. Scalabrini’s approach to the phenomenon of emigration For Scalabrini, emigration is one of the aspects of the "social question", a term that in his time, the last decades of the 19th century, was used to refer to the conditions of the workers and of the poor. One of the characteristics of Scalabrini is the scientific approach toward the social phenomena. He combines it with the search for practical answers, structured and institutionalised, according to the needs identified in his research. Scalabrini recognizes that "social facts usually are not either good or evil, but can be either one or the other, depending on the circumstances". Emigration is a natural right. Man can go after his well being anywhere in the world. In reality, when emigration is abandoned to itself without advice and without guidance, or when it is induced by unscrupulous agents, it is like a fever that slowly consumes the social organism. The practical conclusion drawn by Scalabrini is: there must be " freedom to emigrate but not freedom to force or to induce people to emigrate". "Emigration in almost all cases is not a pleasure but a necessity that cannot be avoided… For the poor, the fatherland is the country that provides bread, especially when the land of their birth is known only through two hateful forms: taxation and military conscription". Even though Scalabrini does not posses the technical terminology of sociology and anthropology he describes the phenomenon that has brought to the formation of today’s multiethnic and multicultural societies. In his study of the phenomenon of migration he is fascinated by the results produced by emigration into the Americas. He points out that a process of fusions and adaptations takes place in which the various nationalities meet, intermingle, forge themselves anew and give origin to other peoples. Scalabrini is a man of faith and a bishop. Without confusing the levels of analysis he confronts the socio-economic and political vision of emigration with the values and convictions that come from his faith and his pastoral concerns. His theological vision Scalabrini’s vision of emigration is enlightened by his faith in the Lord who guides history with His divine Providence: "Emigration is a law of nature. The physical and the human world depend on this mysterious force, which stirs and mixes the elements of life without destroying them, which carries living organisms born in one place and scatters them throughout space, transforming and bringing them to perfection, thus renewing the miracle of creation at every moment". This description widens in the prophetic vision of the man who is guided by the Spirit: "While races intermingle, through the noise of our machines, on top of all this restless work, of all these gigantic activities, and not without them, a much more ample, noble and sublime enterprise is in the making here on earth: the union in God through Jesus Christ of all the people of good will" (from the talk given at the Catholic Club, New York City, 1901). Scalabrini looks at emigration as a shepherd who wants to be faithful to the mission that has been entrusted to him. In Scalabrini the concept of mission is all embracing and derives directly from the concept of Incarnation: in the Son, made man, the Father loves the whole man, even the "body, the flesh, the human soul. Now we are that flesh, those bones". Pastoral response From this theological perspective some important consequences are derived, both in the pastoral and also in the ecclesial field. Scalabrini’s project of intervention in favour of the emigrants is global and complex. He is concerned about the welfare of the poor and the workers and wants to intervene both where they come from (the causes that provoke emigration) and where they are going. He insists that it is necessary to give advise and guidance to those who are about to make the decision to emigrate, to accompany them to the ports of embarkation, assist them during the trip, help them in the time of insertion in the new environment. It is also necessary to declare an all out war on the so called "emigration agents". Scalabrini called them "merchants of human flesh"; he also referred to them as "those who smell the corpses". His intervention has two characteristic elements: first of all the effort to create an awareness of the problem and to gather the most ample consensus around this issue, calling on the clergy, the laity and all the people of good will because "charity knows no partisanship". The second element is the will to take into consideration all the aspects of the problem, as a whole, because, "when we are dealing with emigration, religious, civil, national, public and private aspects, cannot be separated without harm". In regard to the laws to regulate emigration, Scalabrini is contrary to generalized restrictions that he considers useless, unjust and harmful: useless because they would never be able to eliminate emigration, unjust because they would impede the free exercise of a human right, harmful because emigration would take other ways, falling more easily in the hands of unscrupulous persons. He therefore concludes:" The important thing for a law in not to be liberal but to be good, and for me a good law is not one that is wider, but one that, based on justice and better provides for those needs for which it has been made". Scalabrini often repeated what an emigrant wrote to him from Brazil: " Here we are like animals; we live and die without priests, teachers and doctors". Scalabrini added: "these are the three forms under which civil society presents itself to the mind of the poor". In order to respond to the needs of the emigrants Scalabrini, with the support of Pope Leo XIII, founded a Congregation of Missionary priests and brothers. He also promoted the involvement of lay people. In 1891, in his first Conference on Italian Emigration he stated: "I founded two societies, one made up of priests, the other of lay people; one religious, the other lay; two societies to help and complement each other. The first is the congregation of the Missionaries aiming especially at the spiritual welfare of our emigrants, the latter at their material welfare. In 1895 Scalabrini founded also a Religious Congregation of Sisters dedicated to the service of the emigrants. Special characteristics of Scalabrini’s approach to the pastoral work for emigrants The objective of the pastoral work of Scalabrini is the "evangelization of the poor and of the workers". He is concerned about the emigration of the poor classes: the farmers and labourers, the factory workers, the small craftsmen and merchants. Scalabrini, with the support of the Pope, addresses himself to his brother bishops, of the ones of the country of origin of the emigrants, Italy, and the ones of the countries of destination, in the Americas. In the ecclesial prospective Scalabrini often compares the missionary work in the frontiers of Asia and Africa, where the Church invests in means and people for the "expansion of the faith", with the extreme necessity of the "conservation of the faith" of the millions of poor Catholics "dispersed in the vast regions of the New World". Scalabrini believes that the expansion of the Church will depend more on the human mobility than on the "missio ad gentes". To the bishops of the countries of destination of the emigrants he communicates his profound conviction that the goal of their pastoral attention to them should be "to bring together the dispersed children of God into one family" and therefore the perfect communion and participation in the local Church, that would see itself enriched with a new life and new forms of Christian piety. This objective could be reached if the process of integration of the emigrants was encouraged but not forced. The pastoral care of the diocesan bishop for the emigrants is manifested when he establishes a pastoral relationship with these children of God who have arrived in his diocese by assigning to their care missionaries who are familiar with their language and their traditions. The missionaries would recreate that environment that the emigrants had left in their own countries and that would sustain them in their first impact with a world that was completely different. We recognize here Scalabrini the catechist and the shepherd who has a prolonged experience in the care of souls among the poor. For Scalabrini, faith is transmitted mostly through the parents, especially through the mothers, and is maintained inseparably joined with the mother tongue, especially in the poor person who hasn’t been able to obtain a formal education. "A very apt element in the preservation of the faith is exactly the preservation of the language of origin. This is not the place to investigate what may be its mysterious reason, but daily experience tells us that as long as an individual, a family, or a whole community preserves its own language, it will not likely lose its own faith". Scalabrini does not utilize the terms of the social sciences, as personal or ethnic identity, but he describes their content and role as an attentive observer. "The affectionate care of the apostle" of the emigrants consists therefore in a delicate work of transplanting, where a motherly sensitivity is needed in order that the roots of the transplanted may not dry up and, maintaining their strength, they may, little by little, reach out in the unfamiliar soil. We can therefore summarize as follows the intuitions of Scalabrini’s pastoral heart: • Attention to migrants’ culture: in its evangelizing attention toward the children of poverty and labour, the Church must respect the particular ethnic and linguistic cultures of migrants, precisely because culture is the "normal" way of living and conserving the faith, especially for people (such as migrants) who are culturally less sophisticated. • The "providential" view of the phenomenon of migration: Scalabrini realized that the children of poverty and labour, who in human and sociological terms seemed to be a mass of exploited people and failures, were in fact the builders of a new society and were the special place and instrument for the building up of the Kingdom — "the union of Christian peoples", as he called it. This is a prophetic view, which reads history not with the key of the dominant economy, but with that of the wisdom of God, who uses what is not in order to put to shame what is. This "wisdom reading" of migration is the treasure that Scalabrini left to the Church. • The "pentecostal communion" between cultures, ethnic groups, languages and religions: Scalabrini wrote about this intuition to Pope Pius X, one month before his death in 1905. After his pastoral visits to the United States and Brazil, he realized that migration (including Italian migration) was entering a new phase; and the Church had the task of "smoothing" or "softening" cultures, helping them to enter into communion with one another. This is Scalabrini’s spiritual testament, which he entrusted to his children and to the Church.
Ref.: September 2002. |