Professor Nancy Enright, Director of The Core, Featured in Today’s American Catholic

English Professor and Director of The Core Nancy Enright published an essay in Today’s American Catholic. The piece, "Welcoming the Stranger," looks at contemporary culture and the plight of migrants and refugees through the lens of empirical research and scripture.  

Enright opens the essay with context, tying together a number of different identity threads in contemporary culture as it relates to what is seen as the threat from migrants.

We’re Christians, we’re Americans, we’re patriots. We have compassion for these migrants. We love people but we just want to make sure our children are safe." These were the words of a protestor against migrants being housed in a former Catholic school in Staten Island as quoted on ABC’s Eyewitness News on Saturday, August 26, 2023. The three sentences link to several connected ideas in America today: Christian identity as being important; American identity and patriotism as being somehow intricately linked to it, almost subsuming it; and the idea that compassion for migrants, even when acknowledged as it is here, must give place to the goal of "protecting" our borders, our children, our nation from the "threat" at the border.

Dealing in facts, Enright examines the idea of "threat" and the need to "protect our children" from the perception of immigrant criminality.

…is it true that migrants are more likely to commit crimes, or are more dangerous than native-born Americans? On the contrary. In a December 2020 article in Scientific American, Melinda Wenner Moyer notes that 'a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA . . . reports that between 2012 and 2018, compared with their U.S.-born neighbors, undocumented immigrants in Texas were less than half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses and less than a quarter as likely to be arrested for property crimes.'

In light of the research that shows that "undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and, especially, native-born U.S. citizens," Enright concludes:

Therefore, fear, as an excuse for lack of compassion for immigrants, is not a legitimate explanation. In fact, a theological exploration beginning with Scripture is an important beginning for a re-examination of these attitudes.

The Theological Exploration
Within the essay Enright works her way through both the Old and New Testament and delivers a wealth of scriptural proscription against treating immigrants poorly as well as a number of demands that they be treated well. She begins:

…the Israelites were enjoined by God to have compassion on the stranger among them. In fact, the command is given twice in the Lord’s series of injunctions to his people, even before they enter the land of Canaan (Israel): "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt," in Exodus 22:21, and "You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt," in Exodus 23:9. In Leviticus, the Lord goes even further and commands love for the alien: "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God" (Lev 19:33-34).

She continues,

This idea of welcoming the alien is echoed throughout the Bible. The book of Ruth is a story of refugees being welcomed: first Elimelech, Naomi, and their family are welcomed in Moab, and then Ruth, the Moabite, accompanying her mother-in-law back to Israel, is welcomed by Boaz, who ultimately marries her. In several places, the care for the alien is linked to a similar concern Israel was to show to the poor as well as orphans and widows. Ruth’s gathering the gleanings in the field of Boaz is an example of an alien and a widow (both of which she was) benefiting from these compassionate laws: "When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands" (Deut 24:19). In fact, harm to aliens (along with other marginalized groups—again, the orphans and widows) is not only forbidden but shown to lead to God’s curse. In a series of warnings to be given by the Levites to the people, we hear: "Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan, and widow" (Deut 27:19).

Not only are these stipulations given in the Law, but the Prophets also extend the concept of compassion to the alien. In Jeremiah, we are told: "Thus says the Lord, ‘Do justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. Also do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan, or the widow; and do not shed innocent blood in this place’" (Jer 22:3). The compassionate treatment of the stranger, the sojourner, is again part of a general atmosphere of righteousness linked to how Israel is to treat all the marginalized. Similarly, the prophet Zechariah says, "Do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another" (Zech 7:10). Truly, the message of how to treat the alien is throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise when Jesus, the incarnation of the God speaking these things to his people, reinforces them in his own teachings.

In Matthew 25, as Jesus tells the story of the sheep and the goats, representing the good and the evil nations in the final judgment, he includes how they treat the "stranger" as one of the criteria on which they will be judged. “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” (Matt 25:35), he says to the sheep on his right hand, but to the goats on his left, "I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me" (Matt 25:43). As in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus also connects the treatment of the stranger with how one treats the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the imprisoned. And the message could not be clearer: "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me" (Matt 25:40). Chillingly, to those on his left, he says, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me," warning further, "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matt 25:45-46).

Further reinforcing her point with passages and analysis of Luke 4:22-8, Gen. 19:9 and Ezek. 16:49-50, Enright concludes:

Pride, selfishness, and lack of concern for those in need, especially the aliens and others most marginalized, are grave sins in the eyes of God. What we must fear is not the suffering migrants coming to our cities, but the lack of compassion that is dangerously being cultivated on a daily basis even in the hearts of those who claim to know Christ.

Read the full essay, "Welcoming the Stranger," in Today’s American Catholic.

Categories: Arts and Culture, Faith and Service