McElroy Urges Solidarity with Undocumented Immigrants at JRS/USA and the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Co-sponsored Procession and Mass | Catholic Standard

Decrying the federal government’s policy of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which he described as a “governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women,” Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy at a Sept. 28 Mass said Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan should guide Catholics’ response in standing in solidarity with those immigrants, regarding them as neighbors just as the Samaritan did to the robbery victim needing help.

In his homily at a Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle marking the 111^thWorld Day of Migrants and Refugees, Cardinal McElroy said the parable in that day’s gospel reading raises a central question for Catholics to face as citizens and believers, regarding “whether 10 million men and women and children and families who have lived alongside us for decades should face terror and expulsion: Are they our neighbors?”

“In the Gospel today, Jesus demands that the central perspective we must bring to understanding the moral legitimacy of the campaign of fear and deportation being waged in our country today springs from the bonds of community that have come to tie us together as neighbors with the undocumented, not the question of whether sometime in the past individuals broke a law by entering or remaining in the United States,” Cardinal McElroy said.

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Read the past procession program here