The US Bishops' You Are Not Alone Initiative
How Local Churches Can Stand in Solidarity with Immigrants and Refugees
At a virtual event hosted by the Catholic Theological Society of America this past spring, the theologian Leo Guardado explained that the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s—an ecumenical network of church congregations throughout the US that provided shelter and other services to refugees fleeing Central America—was not only involved in advocacy on behalf of immigrants and refugees, but was also re-imagining what the Church’s presence in the world can look like. He suggested that the Church in the US today needs to undertake a similar re-imagining in response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies.
At their fall meeting earlier this month, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) unveiled what they have called the You Are Not Alone initiative, a set of practices that dioceses and parishes can adopt to show solidarity with migrant families. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, the Chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, introduced the initiative at a press conference on November 11 where he also offered harsh criticisms of the Trump administration’s policies. At the time, the You Are Not Alone initiative was overshadowed by the bishops’ “special message” on immigration, but as I noted in my commentary on the message, the You Are Not Alone initiative has the potential to end up being more important over the long term. That’s because the initiative encourages Catholics to put the Church’s teachings on migration into practice in a way that can make a difference in the lives of immigrants and that re-imagines the Church’s witness in our current context.
The You Are Not Alone initiative is part of the USCCB’s longstanding Justice for Immigrants Campaign, which was established in 2004 in conjunction with the publication in 2003 of Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, the pastoral letter on immigration co-authored by the Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico. Justice for Immigrants was formed as one way for the US Catholic Church to put into practice the teachings of the pastoral letter. It’s a network of Catholic organizations—including the USCCB’s office of Migration and Refugee Services, Catholic Charities USA, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), and several religious orders of men and women, among others—that is dedicated to educating the public about the Catholic Church’s teachings on immigration and advocating for immigration reform. It was only natural then, to link the new You Are Not Alone initiative with the Justice for Immigrants Campaign and to give the campaign a new focus more than 20 years after its founding.
On its web site, Justice for Immigrants highlights the four commitments Pope Francis urged on nations in his 2018 World Day of Migrants and Refugees message: welcome, protect, promote, and integrate. To “welcome” means to respect the right of people to migrate and to provide legal means for migrants and refugees to reach receiving nations. To “protect” means to take measures to respect the dignity of migrants and refugees on their journey and as they enter a new country. To “promote” means to ensure that new arrivals have their basic needs met and the means of pursuing dignified work. And to “integrate” means to build a “culture of encounter” between immigrants’ cultural identity and the cultures already present in the receiving country.
In the United States today, all four of these commitments are under attack. One might say that in this context, the Church’s role is to serve as a “field hospital,” one of Pope Francis’s favorite images for the Church, by seeking to heal our wounded political culture and tend to the needs of the immigrants and refugees who are suffering as a result of our nation’s policies. The You Are Not Alone initiative is a framework for how dioceses and parishes can carry out the role of field hospital. To that end, the initiative distinguishes three types of action local churches can take: emergency and family support, solidarity through public prayer and witness, and accompaniment and pastoral care.
The first category includes actions that can assist immigrants and their families in response to enforcement actions. For example, CLINIC has provided resources that parishes or other groups can use to host a “Know Your Rights” event or that can be provided to immigrants and their families. These resources include information on what to do if you are stopped by members of law enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Border Patrol and on what rights you have if you are detained. There are also resources with information on what to do if law enforcement agents come to your home, for example.
The emergency and family support category also includes a “Rapid Response Toolkit” that outlines what community members can do during after an immigration raid like those that have been occurring regularly in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte. For example, the toolkit recommends identifying members of the community who can serve as interpreters in relevant languages and encouraging immigrant families to develop a plan for contacting a lawyer, providing childcare, and collecting important personal documents if a family member is detained. Certain members of a rapid response group may volunteer to come to the scene when a raid is in progress to gather information about what has occurred and to identify the law enforcement agents involved, if possible. And once people are arrested, the team helps put into action any plans to contact lawyers, take care of family members, and maintain lines of communication with other members of the community.
The initiative also highlights a fund established by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to assist immigrant families who have been significantly impacted by the detention of a family member. Other dioceses can imitate what Los Angeles is already successfully doing.
Actions that fall into the category of prayer and public witness have probably been the most visible over the past several months. For example, clergy from multiple Christian denominations have participated in protests in front of the Broadview ICE detention center in Chicago, and some have even been arrested for their efforts. Catholics have participated in a Eucharistic procession seeking to make the sacrament available to those detained in the Broadview center.
The You Are Not Alone web site provides resources provided by Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) for how a diocese or parish could hold their own faith rally and prayer vigil in support of immigrants. For example, the resources include scriptural passages and prayers that can be used during the event and tips for marketing the event on social media. Another resource available from You Are Not Alone is a booklet on how to pray the rosary for immigrants and refugees, linking each of the mysteries of the rosary to a reflection on migration. This rosary could be prayed by individuals or parish groups.
The final category of the You Are Not Alone initiative is providing pastoral and other forms of accompaniment to migrants. For example, in June, Bishop Michael Pham of San Diego and several other faith leaders accompanied migrants to their court hearings at the local federal courthouse, a practice that has been imitated by Catholic faith groups around the country in the following months. You Are Not Alone points to JRS’s Migrant Accompaniment Network, a group of volunteers across the US providing similar support at court hearings. The Migrant Accompaniment Network’s volunteers also help new arrivals identify important community resources like legal assistance, housing, employment, and pastoral care.
You Are Not Alone also includes information on pastoral ministry to immigrants in detention provided by the Catholic Prison Ministries coalition. In their recent special message, the US bishops identified meeting the religious needs of immigrants who have been detained by law enforcement as a matter of human dignity and a religious liberty issue.
The You Are Not Alone web site also highlights Villanova University’s Immigration Studies Training for Advocates program, which trains students to provide legal advocacy for immigrants.
The different resources provided in these three categories are a good starting point for dioceses, parishes, and other groups hoping to stand in solidarity with immigrants and refugees. Hopefully the You Are Not Alone initiative will add more resources as the weeks go by. If you want, share any relevant initiatives undertaken in your local community in the comments of this post. For example, here in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Catholic Charities has put together a toolkit in English and Spanish on “Know Your Rights” and family planning in case of the arrest and detention of a family member.
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the three areas of action promoted by the You Are Not Alone initiative easily line up with the three roles of Christ that are taken up by every Christian at baptism (Lumen Gentium, #31): priest (accompaniment and pastoral care), prophet (solidarity through public prayer and witness), and king (emergency and family support). The faithful are called to live out these three roles in different ways, and showing solidarity with immigrants and refugees is one important way Catholics today can live out their baptismal vocation. The You Are Not Alone initiative is a resource for assisting Catholics in that task, and it also helpfully demonstrates that there are multiple ways the faithful can show their solidarity, based on their talents and state in life.
Coming Soon…
Last week, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the document Una Caro, or “In Praise of Monogamy.” The document draws on recent papal and conciliar teaching, the work of theologians (primarily from the medieval period and the 20th century), and even poetry to explain to the world the Church’s teaching on the beauty of monogamy. Oddly, the document is currently only available in Italian. I am waiting for the publication of the official English translation of the document before commenting on it, but I may go ahead and write about it next week using an unofficial translation if the official version is not forthcoming. However, Charles Collins writing at Crux has already pointed out one serious weakness with the text: Although in the introduction it identifies the efforts of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) to develop a pastoral response to Catholics in polygamous marriages as one of the reasons for the document (#2), the document itself seems to be written from an almost entirely Western context. Aside from a note referring to SECAM’s efforts mentioned earlier, all of the sources are from the West (Europe, North America, and Latin America). The document does not give attention to the specific areas of concern related to marriage outside of that Western context. Collins notes that this reflects a lack of synodality in the drafting of the document. One might add the DDF faced a similar problem with Fiducia Supplicans, the 2023 document permitting blessings for individuals in same-sex relationships, which the majority of Africa’s bishops refused to implement. To be fair, the DDF has been collaborating with SECAM on the latter’s upcoming pastoral guidance on polygamy, and so the DDF may have held off on addressing that issue directly in Una Caro to avoid stepping on SECAM’s toes. Still, this is definitely a dynamic to be aware of.
Starting with today’s article on the You Are Not Alone initiative, I will be making use of Substack’s feature allowing authors to “tag” articles by identifying the main topics of the article. This allows the author and readers to group articles on the same topic. Substack introduced this feature back in 2023, but for whatever reason I never made use of it until now. I will tag this and all future articles with relevant topics, and over time I will go back through older articles and tag them, as well. That way, you should be able to quickly and easily identify the articles I’ve written on immigration or synodality. We’ll see how it goes!