Confident Kindness Makes American Great…

A colleague sent me Cardinal Joseph Tobin’s statement of Jan. 27th regarding recent Executive Actions–a few lines of which I’ll share here:

This nation has a long and rich history of welcoming those who have sought refuge because of oppression or fear of death.  The Acadians, French, Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews and Vietnamese are just a few of the many groups over the past 260 years whom we have welcomed and helped to find a better, safer life for themselves and their children in America.

Even when such groups were met by irrational fear, prejudice and persecution, the signature benevolence of the United States of American eventually triumphed.

That confident kindness is what has made, and will continue to make, America great.

His full statement can be found here, with the Archdiocese of Newark: Cardinal Joseph Tobin Statement

As we heard in our first weekend this past weekend from the prophet Zephaniah:

Seek the LORD, all you humble of the earth,
who have observed his law;
seek justice, seek humility;
perhaps you may be sheltered…. (Zephaniah 2:3)

Katharine E. Harmon

Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., is Project Director for the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota.  A Roman Catholic pastoral liturgist and American Catholic historian, Harmon is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s liturgical studies program.  She has contributed over a dozen articles and chapters to the fields of both liturgical studies and American Catholicism.  She is the author of  There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-1959 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013) and Mary and the Liturgical Year: A Pastoral Resource  (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2023). She edits the blog, Pray Tell.

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Comments

2 responses to “Confident Kindness Makes American Great…”

  1. Jean Romains

    If I may quote from Friday’s reflection in GUTD: “We are all displaced persons, and we long to return, but cannot in this life. We are all refugees, searching and seeking all our lives for that lost homeland which is perfect union with God…[Though] the situation of so many…may seem quite hopeless, the lot of humanity displaced from Paradise is gloriously hopeful–for those who care to take what God has to offer. His immigration laws are not stringent. He does not exclude the maimed and useless. He does not refuse a home to the old, the illegitimate, the mentally unbalanced. He does not demand that we be an economic asset.” Barbara Dent, Open Me the Gates

    O, that the Lord grows weary with his people — “Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house; clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own flesh?” Isaiah 58:7

  2. jeff armbruster

    Amen.


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