MIAMI (CNS) — The head of Catholic Relief Services told several hundred Hispanic leaders from the U.S. Southeast recently that they are a vital part of the church’s future “global voice” and missionary discipleship.
“The statement you see on signs all the time n
ow is ‘when you see something, say something,’ and to be a missionary disciple it is ‘when you see something, do something,'” said Sean Callahan, president and CEO of CRS, the U.S. Catholic Church’s overseas relief and development agency.
“We need to be seen as the doers, and there is a great opportunity right now for the Catholic Church to come together and be more of a force for right and for justice in a country of people who want justice,” he said.
Callahan, a 28-year veteran of CRS in his second year of leadership at the Baltimore-based agency, spoke Feb. 23 to more than 340 mostly Hispanic leaders gathered here from among some 30 dioceses that are part of the Southeastern Regional Encuentro comprising church’s episcopal regions V and XIV.
The group met in Miami Feb. 22-24 at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish’s sprawling complex just west of Miami International Airport.
Since 2015, CRS has been one of four major sponsors of the encuentro, which is described as the most important and comprehensive initiative in Hispanic ministry ever undertaken by the Catholic Church in the United States. The initiative involves an estimated 1 million pastoral leaders, 175 dioceses and numerous church organizations, parishes and lay ecclesial movements.
Now that parish- and diocesan-level encuentros have taken place, regional encuentros will be going on around the country through June. What has been an overall four-year process of reflection and action will culminate with the U.S. Catholic Church’s Fifth National Encuentro, or “V Encuentro,” to be held Sept. 20-23 in Grapevine, Texas.
The U.S. church’s First National Encuentro was in 1972. For the upcoming “V Encuentro,” 163 dioceses and archdioceses and more than 2,500 parishes across the country are involved.
Callahan told the Florida Catholic, Miami’s archdiocesan newspaper, that the gathering in South Florida represented a significant moment of encounter for CRS and U.S. Hispanic Catholic leadership, and that CRS is interested in listening as the encuentro participants discuss and define their future role as Hispanic Catholics in America.
“This is the first encuentro we have been so involved with this intimately,” he said. “As we have seen the U.S. becoming more and more Hispanic, we thought it would be important for us to understand what people feel the direction of the church should be, and then how can we be a part of it,” he said.
“And one of the strengths (of this partnership) is bringing the voice of the American people overseas to people in difficult situations and letting people know that they are not alone and that people here care about them and share that solidity,” he said of the work of CRS. “We want to see where that part of the church comes out in this encuentro process.”
When asked about President Donald Trump’s March 5 expiration date for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program program, or DACA, that offers protections for immigrants in the U.S. illegally who were brought by this country as children by their parents, Callahan said that CRS has been following the lead of the U.S. bishops in urging a political solution sooner rather than later.
(The March 5 deadline was rendered insignificant Feb. 26 when the U.S. Supreme Court’s refused to hear a Trump administration appeal of a lower court ruling that the government must continue to accept DACA renewals beyond that deadline.)
“We are supporting the initiative promoted by the bishops of having everyone reach out to their senators and congressman to make sure action is taken on DACA by calling our political representatives so that they can make a better determination (of what to do) rather than kicking the ball down the road and waiting,” Callahan said.
If they do kick the ball down the road, he said, “then the question is: Does the United States government start to deport people who have been in the U.S. for most of their lives, and do we start breaking apart families, livelihoods, businesses, friends, communities?”
“It is incredibly disruptive to have over 700,000 under the threat of being deported at any time,” he added.
Likewise, CRS is publicly urging that the U.S. not drastically reduce spending on foreign humanitarian assistance and food aid, a cut of some $2.5 billion of funding reportedly proposed in the administration’s fiscal year 2019 budget request.
“The proposals are anathema to the American spirit and who we are in reaching out to people, and frankly being a leader in the world doesn’t mean you have more money, being a leader in the world is showing you care for people and why you do things,” Callahan said.
“The Catholic Church’s activities in the U.S. and overseas are very value based, and though we have seen the threat of cuts there has been an outpouring of people who say this is who we are and we need to continue it, and there are people in Congress who say, ‘We agree.'”
Callahan, who worked in Central and Latin America during the course of his career at CRS, touched on several other timely regional concerns, including the gang and drug-trafficking related humanitarian crisis situations in several Central America nations as well as the ongoing political and economic hardships in Venezuela.
Callahan underscored the impact that CRS and the church are having with at-risk youth in places such as Guatemala, for example, by helped young adults train for employment and stay in country rather than become economic refugees.
“In many cases, people are being forced out from where they are, and our job is to allow people stay where they want to stay with safety and security for their family with the right to employment,” he said. “The Northern Triangle is one area that we really want to intervene and reduce violence and give people other opportunities,” Callahan said of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Venezuela, he added, is a key country where there is a lot of turmoil, the inflation has gone up, the people are in a dire situation “and so we work with Caritas International and Caritas Venezuela as a lead organization so that we can provide greater assistance to the people of Venezuela,” he said.
CRS now works in some 110 countries and assists 137 million people annually, he noted, adding that large scale migration trends from Africa into Europe will continue to be a source of humanitarian challenges in the coming decades.