Hispanics Look to Pope Francis to Life Debate on Immigration with U.S. Visit

Washington Post: 

By Mary Jordan

August 31, 2015

Hispanics look to Pope Francis to lift debate on immigration with U.S. visit

Karla Perez loves Pope Francis. Like her, he’s a native Spanish speaker. He is also the first Latin American to lead the Catholic Church, and he talks easily about soccer and prefers public buses to luxury cars.

Most of all, though, Perez loves this pope because he has made better treatment of immigrants a centerpiece of his two-year-old papacy.

She hopes, as do many of the nearly 30 million Hispanic Catholics in the country, that this month’s visit by Francis will change the tone of the nation’s divisive immigration debate.

“I’m an immigrant myself, and I hear politicians saying they want to build higher walls. I can’t remember a time when it’s been this ugly,” said Perez, 31, an elementary school teacher who emigrated from El Salvador when she was a child and now attends Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, Va.

Perez said that at a time when politicians are talking about mass deportations, “anchor babies” and revoking birthright citizenship, she is eager to hear the pope’s “gentle, kind voice that makes you feel like you are going to be okay.”

On Sept. 23, the morning after the pope lands in Washington on a flight from Cuba, thousands of Latinos — 50,000 or more, by some estimates — will walk, take the bus or ride the Metro to the White House following special sunrise Masses held across the region in Spanish. The pope is expected to greet the crowds outside after meeting with President Obama.

Francis will hold high-profile meetings with Latinos and immigrants in each of the three U.S. cities he is visiting — Washington, New York and Philadelphia — and Catholic leaders hope he urges elected officials to fix the system that has left 11 million undocumented people living in the United States in the shadows.

The pope has described immigrants as victims of an unequal world, calling the need to help them a “humanitarian emergency.”

“I am sure that all Hispanics,” especially the undocumented, hope Francis will talk about the “immigration drama” flaring in the United States, said Mario Dorsonville, an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington.

“We expect him to talk about the invisible, those in limbo,” the millions with no legal status, Dorsonville said. “There’s no bigger poverty than being invisible.”

Daniel Flores, a Catholic bishop in the border city of Brownsville, Tex., said one of the hardships for undocumented immigrants is that they cannot return to Mexico or Central America to see their parents and children because they would not be able to return to the U.S. jobs they need to earn a living.

Flores said he believed the pope would “not be pointedly political” or offer specific policy suggestions, but he would use, instead, his influence as the leader of a church with 1.2 billion members to “remind politicians, when they are crafting laws, to keep in mind human dignity and the importance of family life.”

The pontiff, religion and politics

Some conservatives have criticized the pope for wading into politics, particularly when he pronounced climate change a man-made problem wreaking havoc on the planet and called for people and policies to fix it.

Presidential candidate Jeb Bush said at the time, “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

Catholic leaders have long been outspoken advocates for immigrant rights, though. Parishes throughout the United States provide social services and education to undocumented migrants, many of whom fill their pews at Sunday Mass. The influential U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has lobbied persistently for immigration reform. “It is fundamentally unjust to use the labor of these people and not afford them any protection,” said Flores, the bishop from Texas.

Bush, who converted to Catholicism after marrying a devout Mexican immigrant, recently said that Donald Trump’s plans for kicking out the millions of undocumented people and building a giant border wall are “not based in reality.” Last year, Bush said some illegal immigrants were entering the United States only to provide for their families, and he called it “an act of love.”

On Monday, Trump released a video ripping Bush for that remark. The ad shows mug shots of three men who were charged with murder after entering the country illegally, and it mocks Bush’s words: “Love? Forget love. It’s time to get tough!”

The video heats up the rhetoric on immigration, and some Republicans worry that it may hurt GOP efforts to broaden the party’s base, in part by attracting more Hispanic voters.

Catholics account for 1 in 4 voters in the United States; in 2012, they split their vote, with 50 percent voting for President Obama and 48 percent voting for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, according to the Pew Research Center.

But Hispanic Catholics voted overwhelmingly for Obama, 75 percent to 21 percent, shunning Romney, who spoke of pushing undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” through tougher employment policies.

In Francis, many see a moral leader who uses his powerful pulpit to focus on human principles that he thinks should transcend politics. His U.S. itinerary includes high-profile meetings with Latino schoolchildren in East Harlem and with immigrants outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Earlier this year, the pope told reporters that he had even considered entering the country via border crossing: “To enter the United States from the border with Mexico would be a beautiful gesture of brotherhood and support for immigrants.”

His first trip after he became pope in 2013 was to Lampedusa, Italy, where he threw a wreath into the ocean, where many poor African migrants have drowned trying to reach Europe.

“I felt that I ought to come here today to pray, to make a gesture of closeness, but also to reawaken our consciences so that what happened would not be repeated,” he said in Lampedusa, praising those who have shown “attention to persons on their voyage toward something better.”

A half-dozen parish priests in the Washington region who have large Latino congregations said that attendance was growing at Spanish-language Masses — and Catholic leaders say they are seeing a similar “Pope Francis effect” around the country, too.

“People who had abandoned the church are returning,” said the Rev. Tom Ferguson, the pastor of Good Shepherd in Alexandria. The church’s sanctuary seats 1,000 people, and overflow crowds are causing it to consider adding a third Spanish-language Mass each weekend.

Ferguson said his church used to hear confessions for 45 minutes a week, with one priest. Now, he said, because of rising demand, two priests hear confessions twice a week.

Moises Villalta, pastor of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart Catholic church in the District, where 70 percent of the 2,800 families are Latinos, also has seen an increase: “People are coming back who felt alienated for whatever reason.”

Latinos interviewed say their enthusiasm for Francis is fired by many things, including his embrace of gay or divorced Catholics and his preference for a simple apartment instead of an ornate Vatican palace. They like that he uses Spanish slang and common colloquialisms. He has urged Catholics “to make noise” about their faith as a soccer fan does about his team, and he has described the church as “a mother, not a mother-in-law,” welcoming, not fault-finding.

It is too soon to see whether the pope’s popularity could halt defections from the Catholic Church.

Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which conducts research for U.S. bishops, estimates that 68 million adults and children are Catholic and have some connection to a parish — and that 40 percent of them are Hispanic. Hispanic Catholics, particularly the young, are a rising force within the church.

But the Pew Research Center says that even though most Hispanic adults identify as Catholics, a great number have joined Protestant evangelical churches or have stopped practicing any religion. Pew estimates that nearly 1 in 4 Hispanic adults now consider themselves a “former Catholic.”

“If we don’t change, there is a lot of risk when everyone is changing,” Dorsonville said. “It’s time for us to be more connected to our people.”

Perez, the schoolteacher from Alexandria, said that she feels “a boost” from Francis and that she even visited the Vatican this summer. She said she was struck by the sight of a gay couple at the Vatican who were “holding hands, happy, waiting to see the pope.”

“That was very cool for me,” Perez said, after a packed Mass at Good Shepherd. Francis “doesn’t judge. A lot of popes have judged. He says, ‘Who am I to judge?’ ”

Perez, who arrived here as an undocumented child with her mother 25 years ago and is now a citizen, said that perhaps above all, she wants the pope to address the problems of “hard-working” migrants, because too many politicians are “judging them harshly.”

“I trust in him — he understands the problems of Latinos,” said parishioner Mariana Garcia, 57, who emigrated from El Salvador and cleans houses for a living. “I hope he sends a message to the people with power to please help, to give these people a chance to be legal.”

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com