Thank you, Rev. Chava for this beautiful reflection on the children in the Body of Christ. We join you in prayer for them and their desperate families. And we pray for our Nation that they may be welcomed and cared for here as God’s own children and that our part in their countries’ struggles will turn from exploitation to caring support. 

Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church

Bulletin for Sunday, June 22, 2014
Feast of Corpus Christi

Dear friends,

Central America is bleeding children.

As many as 60,000 children have entered the United States across our
southern border in 2014, and there must be more on the way. They come
fleeing violence, sometimes running from gangs that told them, “join or
die.” They come believing that the United States will take care of them.

How desperate do you have to be to let your child go on such a dangerous
journey?

In all the immigration debate in this country, I have heard much about
whether people ought to be allowed to stay, but little about why they come
here in the first place. – and almost nothing about United States policies
that help to create and maintain the poverty and violence in their home
countries.

The first time I visited El Salvador in 2005 there were many surprises. The
first was the realization as we got off the plane, that we could have
walked there. It would have taken an awful long time, but it we could have.
And millions have walked that journey, heading north instead of south.

The second was the ubiquitous presence of the United States in this Central
American country. You cannot walk down a street in El Salvador without
being aware of the existence of the most powerful country in the world. I
began to understand what it means to be part of an empire as I looked at
the familiar corporate logos on streets in El Salvador. One day we climbed
a steep dirt path to visit a community clinging to life on the side of a
mountain. All the houses were made of sticks and found materials, some
without roofs, with curtains for doors. And there among some of the poorest
people in the world, stuck to a wall I saw an advertisement for a Disney
movie.

Our presence is in the air they breathe. I visited a little town that had
experienced earth tremors which they believed to have been caused by some
deep drilling being done by a North American company in the hills nearby.
Those tremors knocked down about half the town. Another time, we heard
about the companies mining for gold, using chemicals to leach gold from the
earth, destroying the very land. And I heard about the gangs that were
forming. Then, as now, El Salvador was losing hundreds of people daily to
the trek to the north – and the ones that came back were usually criminals,
jailed in the US and then deported – returning to El Salvador to form
gangs, using knowledge they’d gained in prison. And not only El Salvador,
but Guatemala and Honduras, the countries from which those children are
fleeing, now.

On my second visit to El Salvador, my friend Ruth Orantes took me on a tour
of the Baptist High School in Santa Ana. As we stood together looking at a
map of El Salvador, she asked me, “So what do people in the United States
say about El Salvador?”

It hurt to have to tell her the truth. “They don’t,” I said. “I’m not sure
most people even know it exists.”

We need to know that those countries exist, and that they are full of
people, people who need the same things that you and I do – food and
shelter, education and health care, the opportunity to grow and live and
learn. They are not there for us to exploit. Their countries are not
America’s trash can, where we throw what we do not need or want. But that
is how we treat them.

I do not know the solution to the current crisis. But I know that a country
that bleeds its children is a country screaming in pain. We have got to
realize that we are part of what is causing that pain.

Jesuit Jon Sobrino once wrote from El Salvador of the “scandalous
profligacy of the North.” Perhaps there is also the scandalous ignorant
blindness of the North.

Let us be the country these children believe us to be, when they risk their
lives to come here.

Love to all
Chava

Oscar Romero Church
An Inclusive Community of Liberation, Justice and Joy
Worshiping in the Catholic Tradition
Mass: Sundays, 11 am
St Joseph’s House of Hospitality, 402 South Ave, Rochester NY 14620