Consecrated Life and Migration

Consecrated Life and Migration

Pastoral Care with Migrants: From Reception to Integration

by

Prof. Aldo SKODA, cs – Presentation at the XLVII Claretianum Conference

Fr. Aldo Skoda is member of the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles (Scalabrini). After completing his studies in Philosophy and Theology with a degree in Christian Anthropology, he graduated in Psychology from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and obtained a Doctorate in Pastoral Theology from the Pontificia Università Lateranense in Rome. Professor of Pastoral Theology and Human Mobility at Pontificia Università Urbaniana, Fr. Skoda is also Director of the Scalabrini International Migration Institute (SIMI), an institute specialized in interdisciplinary research and training on migration.

Migration emerges as a constant in human history and cyclically influences the reality and contemporaneity of societies and Christian communities. This year’s message for the GMMR, introducing the preposition “with,” poses a challenge and a vision. It is a challenge as it moves to broaden the horizon of education and action in the face of the phenomenon of migration often marked by fear, crisis, sensationalism, and the instrumentalization of those who migrate.

Besides being a challenge, the preposition “with” also introduces a vision that, starting from a biblical-theological foundation, seeks to read and positively respond to the challenges of migrations defined as a “sign of the times.” The phenomenon of human mobility as a historical reality with all its manifestations of opportunity, but also of injustice and suffering, becomes the place where the history of salvation is incarnated as a path of hope.

Moving from a paradigm of socio-pastoral action to one with migrants, refugees, and communities in mobility does not simply assert a change of a proposition, but a different anthropological and phenomenological vision of migrations and the people involved, as well as the concrete action that follows.

The Gospel and the Christian message have not only a “descriptive” value but also a “performative” one, that is, it is active in generating new energies of thought and action in the individual and the community. This awareness entails important consequences for reflection and pastoral action:

Being and building community in the face of weakening relationships, social action, institutions failing to respond effectively to numerous challenges, the prophetic and performative task of the Christian community becomes current.

The dynamism of “going forth” present in the Word of God that wants to provoke in believers and the community the attitude of taking the initiative, getting involved, accompanying. L’EG (Evangelii Gaudium) repeatedly emphasizes that communities become more missionary, «ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive and open, to inspire in pastoral workers a constant desire to go forth and in this way to elicit a positive response from all those whom Jesus summons to friendship with himself» (EG 27).

Furthermore, «Pastoral ministry in a missionary key seeks to abandon the complacent attitude that says: ‘We have always done it this way’. I invite everyone to be bold and creative in this task of rethinking the goals, structures, style and methods of evangelization in their respective communities. A proposal of goals without an adequate communal search for the means of achieving them will inevitably prove illusory. […]. The important thing is to not walk alone, […] in a wise and realistic pastoral discernment. » (EG 33).

The reception of the other and alterity is a distinctly Christian attitude, theologically and biblically founded, that aims to make space for the other to “enlarge one’s tent” in the willingness to share one’s life space. However, it must facilitate true integration understood as a complex and dynamic three-dimensional process: personal, relational, contextual. This process thus involves both the individual and the context with all actors and factors.

«The awareness of the epochal change in mentality and religious experience must lead to the internalized conviction (capable of becoming decision and project) of a shift in the center of gravity of ecclesial action and the consequent renewal of all its forms and structures in a missionary key. It is necessary to renew pastoral action in a missionary sense. From self-referential, all concentrated in the shadow of the bell tower, it is called to assume a style and mode of mission. Not as an exceptional or emergency act, but as a habitual style, as a normality and as a daily dimension. Ordinary pastoral care does not coincide with what has been and is ordinarily done; nor could it be predefined based on some deducible principle. But it is built here and now, in relation to the concrete situation» (Lanza, Convertire Giona).

Translated by Gabriel Biondo, intern at SIMI