Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Displacement
256
Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Displacement
256Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626985407 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Orbis Books |
| Publication date: | 12/08/2023 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 17 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Cover design: Michael Calvente
.Read an Excerpt
Introduction
For months my mother and the rest of the family tried to convince me to leave. They would say, “Antes de que algo pase”—“before something happens.” This “something” referred to the possibility of being taken by the military or the guerrillas to fight for them. My mother had returned from the United States six months prior, after having lived in Los Angeles for four-and-a-half years cleaning houses and working as a nanny in order to provide for the basic needs of life that El Salvador’s war economy could not provide. She returned to El Salvador afraid that she would lose her son “sea a la guerra o a la ausencia”—“either to the war or to absence.” She promised not to leave again without me, but the rest of our extended family was eager for us to flee together. At the beginning of October 1991 we finally left. Before dawn a bus pulled up in front of my grandparent’s adobe house, where my family had gathered the night before. After hugs and attempts to hold back tears, I began to board the colorful bus typical of El Salvador, turning around one last time to gaze upon my grandfather, who, in the absence of a father, had served as a loving and protective presence in my childhood. This would be the last time I would see him.
The bus carried other Salvadorans forced to flee the country, all adults except for a fifteen-year-old girl and me. During the bus ride from my village in Chalatenango to the capital, I counted palm trees. I wanted to commit to memory the sights of my country, not knowing if or when I would return. After one hundred and some palm trees, I lost count and wept as we approached the Guatemalan border. Throughout the journey north my mother kept reciting a prayer that my great grandmother taught her to use in times of danger:
Detrás de un cedro dichoso estaba Cristo y Francisco. Francisco le dijo a Cristo, “hay vienen los enemigos.” “Déjalos que lleguen, Francisco,” le dijo Cristo, “que su vista la traen vendada. Tu cuerpo no será tocado, tu alma será santa y salvada.”
This prayer, which had been passed from generation to generation, accompanied us in a journey that was as intense and harrowing as the place we had left.
A month later, after terrifying moments and encounters with thieves, deportation by Mexican immigration, a night in jail, and pursuits by US immigration agents at the Tijuana–San Diego border, we finally made it into the United States of America. At that point we became “illegals”—a whole category of forcibly displaced persons set apart for persecution. Soldiers and guerrillas were no longer the danger; it was now a matter of evading and surviving border patrol, police, and other agents of the US government who desired our expulsion.
At that time the only hope of legal protection that we had was to apply for a temporary permit. Such permits were issued to Salvadorans and Guatemalans after churches that were providing sanctuary in the United States successfully sued the government for its discriminatory practices against asylum seekers throughout the 1980s. In the midst of the US government’s failure to protect, church communities had become sites of refuge for displaced and persecuted persons. The churches had come to serve as a sanctuary for the poor of Central America, and the creative impact of their faithful actions had opened a way for us to remain temporarily in the United States and not face deportation back to war.
Church and sanctuary are two concepts and historical realities that are fundamentally intertwined. By definition, to speak of sanctuary is to speak of both a place of refuge or protection and of a holy place, such as a temple or church. And to speak of church, by definition, implies both a community of people and particular sites, such as a building used for worship. In the coming chapters I bring these multiple meanings together to argue for an understanding of church as sanctuary, as a people and site of refuge in an age of forced displacement. More specifically, I make the case that the ancient and contemporary practice of refuge in the church is a concretization of a church of and for the poor in the United States. In times of unprecedented global displacement, sanctuary is a pillar of what it means to be church.
Since the 1980s, when church sanctuary became a controversial national movement in the United States, various academic works have engaged this concept and practice, mostly from a sociological or anthropological perspective, but an explicit theological analysis of church sanctuary has been lacking. Particularly in the Roman Catholic tradition there has been a theological gap concerning church sanctuary, which has accompanied a widespread ecclesiastical rejection of this practice. This work aims to relocate the tradition of sanctuary in the heart of the church.
As in the 1980s, unbearable violence in Central America continues to displace persons and communities, who then are forced to seek refuge in other countries; many of them attempt to find it in the United States. In addition to Central Americans, there are persons from South America, Africa, China, Haiti, and from many other regions and countries throughout the globe who now cross through Central America and Mexico in order to arrive at the US-Mexico border in search of refuge and asylum. While the specific countries from where people come can change in a given year, the fact that the number of forcibly displaced persons globally has more than doubled in the past decade means that, for the foreseeable future, a vast sector of humanity will be on the move. The United States temporarily allows some communities to enter legally, but the vast majority of the world’s displaced are denied legal entry. Unable to live in their places of origin and rejected at the border, an unauthorized entry through the desert wilderness becomes their act of hope and their struggle for life. Those who make it into the United States can begin a complex process of rebuilding fragments of life anew, but under the ever-present threat of deportation. Months and years can go by before a person or family receives an order of deportation or is apprehended in an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raid, but once this happens, there are very few options available to stay. In some cases the person or family has no other choice to resist deportation but to seek refuge in a church. This is not technically a legal option, but it can lead to new legal possibilities as the local community gathers in support, unleashing creative responses previously unseen.
In contrast to the 1980s experience of church sanctuary, which focused on transporting and providing refuge and protection to persons and families who were fleeing the violence of Central America and who were arriving in the United States, most of the persons who are now forced to seek sanctuary have already been living in the United States for years and may even have children who are US citizens. This does not mean that there is not a network of active churches and communities who help transport and protect persons in various creative ways across borders today, but this work is not public or at the scale at which it took place in prior decades. Among other factors, such as changed immigration laws and penalties for breaking these laws, the changed political situation in Latin America affects the public’s conception of sanctuary.
In the 1980s, the US government was directly supporting the Salvadoran military during El Salvador’s civil war. Although homicide rates in El Salvador and across Central America continue to approximate those of a country or region at war, officially there is no armed conflict taking place that fits classical notions of war. At best, one can argue that what Central America lives through now is the aftermath of many decades of direct US neocolonial interests in the region. But without direct US involvement in a Central American war, in the public’s consciousness US society does not have direct responsibility for the thousands of people who continue to arrive at the border or who are threatened with deportation back to warlike conditions. Among ecclesiastical leaders in the United States, both in the 1980s and now, there is general opposition to church sanctuary. And yet, when all other options have failed, people still turn to church communities with the hope of refuge, and some churches still become sites of sanctuary, but rarely does this happen in the Roman Catholic Church.
Sanctuary is an emergency response to a situation of persecution, and, in the United States, the nature of the persecution of unauthorized persons is directly connected to the political interests of a given administration. During the Trump presidency, for example, more people sought sanctuary in churches because the risks of deportation were higher as ICE targeted unauthorized persons not only in an attempt to expel them, but also in an attempt to maintain private prisons at full capacity in order to further justify the political need for such private prisons. It is well known that the incarceration of black and brown persons in the United States is very profitable for corporations, and it behooves faith communities and ecclesiastical leaders to take such political and financial interests into account when discerning how they will respond to persons threatened with deportation who seek sanctuary in the church.
The emphasis on church sanctuary may appear too traditional in its scope, too ecclesio-centered, too bound up with church hierarchy and with patriarchal structures that can end up enacting harm upon persons who are forced to seek refuge. Some scholars may legitimately ask whether church sanctuary in the United States is not simply the privileged actions of mostly white communities who can turn refuge on and off depending on how pleased they are with those who seek refuge. Critics of church sanctuary may argue that we need to decouple sanctuary from church and church from sanctuary. After all, refuge can be practiced in any place by any people without any reference to notions of church. While there is truth in these questions and critiques, I maintain that church and sanctuary are fundamentally bound together in theory and in practice. Church sanctuary, despite all of its historical shortcomings and contradictions, complements and ensures that other forms of sanctuary beyond the church are legible as a common heritage of humanity. The endurance of church sanctuary is, has been, and, I trust, will continue to be an efficacious sign of hope that there are, can, and must be sites of refuge in this world where death-dealing violence is resisted and overcome. Until the deportation of forcibly displaced, poor, and persecuted persons is no longer a form of death sentence, the church in the modern world cannot close the door to sanctuary, but must be rebuilt as sanctuary.
This book is divided into three intersecting parts. Part I remembers the enduring ecclesial challenge of the 1980s sanctuary ministry and movement. Part II lays the theological foundation for rethinking the church in an age of forced displacement. Part III envisions the rebuilding of the church as sanctuary, as a people and site of refuge, healing, holiness, and salvation.
Chapter 1 revisits the sanctuary movement of the 1980s and its origin as a faith-based ecumenical and interreligious ministry with refugees who were being sent back to the US-funded war in El Salvador. Communities in southern Arizona, with the initiative of Jim Corbett, a Friend (Quaker), developed a capacious vision of sanctuary that included, yet exceeded, any religious tradition that was willing to stand with those whose humanity the government was violating. The rapid expansion of sanctuary beyond the Arizona borderlands gave rise not only to a national movement, but also to competing visions of the nature of sanctuary and of the role of churches.
Chapter 2 shows that the conflicting visions of sanctuary were marked less by religious and denominational differences and more by philosophical and theological frameworks for social transformation and political engagement. For Corbett, sanctuary was built on a theology of God’s dwelling and communion and a Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence for social change. Borderland communities argued that sanctuary churches were enacting civil initiative, not civil disobedience, and that their actions were fundamentally constructive of, and for, humanity. Sanctuary was not seen as a means to an end but as a way of being that already contained within itself the possibility of a humanizing global society and of a borderless church.
Chapter 3 shows how the ancient practice of church sanctuary, akin to biblical cities of refuge, served as a practice for the protection of persecuted life. Beyond its associations as a refuge for criminals, the earliest Christian references to sanctuary from the fourth century reveal that it was also a refuge for the poor and oppressed who sought what bishops called the mercy of the church. Codified as a right within ecclesiastical law from the fifth century on, references to sanctuary were removed in the late twentieth century based on the assumption that sanctuary was no longer needed in the modern nation-state because laws had been “humanized.” Today, sanctuary may no longer exist as a legal right in the modern nation-state, but it can exist again as the religious principle that it was before it became a right.
Chapter 4 undertakes an examination of the nature and mission of the church as expressed through key documents of Vatican II and the thinkers that shaped this ecclesial event. The erasure of the tradition of sanctuary from the Roman Catholic Church’s canon law in the twentieth century invites a reconsideration of fundamental ecclesiological questions—who and what is the church, and what is it for? The church’s theological affirmation that it is a humanizing presence in the world and a sacrament of salvation invites both historical verification and translation in relation to particular contexts of dehumanization and death.
Chapter 5 argues that, if Vatican II opened up the possibility for responding to the pressing signs of the times of modernity, the Latin American church’s recommitment to struggle against institutionalized violence allows for a rethinking of the church as the dwelling place of, and for, the poor and persecuted, where the church encounters its own foundation in Christ. A sacramental understanding of Christ’s presence in the poor holds the greatest possibility for a people of faith enfleshing sanctuary despite the borders of the church and the state.
Chapter 6 demonstrates how Archbishop Óscar Romero, like the bishops of the fourth century who lived into their sacramental responsibility to protect persons forced to seek sanctuary, risked his life in defense of the poor and persecuted of El Salvador, especially in the town of Aguilares in 1977. His embodied witness and sacramental insights about the nature and mission of the church in the midst of the idolatry of national security illustrate a fundamental aspect of the tradition of church sanctuary: a people in communion with one another constructs sanctuary. His martyrdom remains a piercing challenge for ecclesiastical leaders and for Christian churches in the United States who hold on to their own security at the cost of those who are persecuted for seeking life.
Chapter 7, the final chapter, develops an understanding of church as sanctuary in relation to four key categories: refuge, healing, holiness, and salvation. Refuge within church communities resists deportation and the way that these state practices become naturalized within a society and church that are being psychologically trained to be indifferent to killing. The sustained encounter that takes place through church sanctuary can give rise to a dynamic process of social healing capable of locating and touching the deepest identities of both the church and of persecuted persons as each becomes an echo of the other. Sanctuary is the practice of holiness, the invocation of the uncontainable presence of God who dwells in the midst of persons and communities who commit their life for the life of others, sanctifying what has been deemed illegal and making of it a sacrament of the Holy. Lastly, where the Holy is practiced, there is salvation. The historicization of salvation incorporates a people into a borderless body that is both marked by the wounds of violence yet transfigured into a sign of peace. In an age of forced displacement, to be church is to be sanctuary.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Part I
1. The Sanctuary of God for the Oppressed of Central America 3
Laying the Foundation for the Ministry of Sanctuary 7
Spiritual and Theological Discernment of Sanctuary 11
The Ministry of Sanctuary Goes Public 16 Conflicting Visions of Sanctuary 20
Attempts to Classify the Nature and Purpose of Sanctuary 24
2. Nonviolent Communion across Borders: The Theology and Gandhian Philosophy of Sanctuary 29
Theological Horizon of the Sanctuary Church 30
Sanctuary’s Capacity to Construct a More Human Society 37
Sanctuary in a Gandhian Framework for Social Change 44
Civil Initiative—Gandhi’s Method for Social Change in the Borderlands 53 Sanctuary as Nonviolent Means and Ends 55
Part II
3. Traditions of Refuge for the Persecuted 63
Cities of Refuge and Asylum 64 Refuge in the Church 71
Disappearing the Ecclesiastical Right of Asylum 85
4. The Sacramental and Humanizing Vision of Vatican II: A Firm Foundation for the Reconstruction of Church Sanctuary 93
Incarnating the Church in History—Chenu and John XXIII 94
The Nature of the Church as Sacrament, as a People of God 104
The Mission of the People of God 113
A Human and Humanizing Church 120
5. The Church of the Poor: A Sacrament of and for Christ 127
Learning to Listen to the Poor 128
A Church of Love Witnesses against Injustice 135
A Church of Peace Witnesses against Violence 137
A Church of the Poor Witnesses against Poverty 141
A True and Mystical Sacrament of Life 150
A Sanctuary for the Body of Christ 157
Part III
6. Archbishop Óscar Romero: A Living Sanctuary for the Persecuted 163
Living in the Company of the Poor 165
The Violation of Sanctuary 169
The Corpus Christi of Aguilares 173
“You Are the Image of the Divine One Who Has Been Pierced” 176
A Living Sanctuary for the Corpus Christi 179
7. Church as Sanctuary: Refuge, Healing, Holiness, and Salvation 183
Refuge from Violence 185 Healing of Wounds 196
Dwelling in Holiness 209 Mutual Salvation 217
Conclusion 229
Acknowledgments 233
Index 235