Welcoming the Migrant

By Timothy Brunk, January 10, 2026

I want to make two points in this post.  The first point concerns the Christian life as a voyage or sojourn.  The second concerns the church as a sacrament of unity.

On the first point, at the conclusion of a prayer service in St. Peter’s Square in 2021, Pope Francis said to those gathered, “I invite you to go over to the monument over there . . .  the boat with the migrants, and to look closely at the expressions of those people and grasp in that look the hope that every migrant has, to start living again.”¹ 

In light of that monument, I want to remind us all that the main space in Christian houses of worship is called a nave.

The word nave comes from the Latin word navis, which means “ship.”  In antiquity, “always the sea is presented as changeable and dangerous, the Mediterranean being peculiarly prone to storms: the sea is a major metaphor in Greek literature for fate and necessity, or circumstances all the wise beyond human control.”  Understandably, then, a ship becomes a symbol of safety in the no less turbulent sea of human living.  Moreover, a ship is going somewhere; there is a sense of direction.  And so early Christians thought of the church as a ship, a navis, a nave.²

Christians gather for worship as those undertaking a voyage on the seas—or a journey on land.  Indeed, early Christians regarded themselves as sojourners, in Greek paroikos,³ a word from which we derive the English word “parish.”⁴  Connecting this sense of journey to the Paschal Mystery, the then Pontifical Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples asserted in 1978 that “the Christian life is essentially a living through of the Passover with Christ, or a journey, a sublime migration towards the total Communion of the Kingdom of God, where everyone and everything is restored in Christ.”⁵  In 2004, the renamed Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples issued an Instruction that called in part for liturgical celebrations that are “more sensitive to the historical and anthropological aspects of migration, so that liturgical celebrations become a living expression of communities of believers who walk hic et nunc on the ways of salvation.”⁶

The second point concerns the teaching in Lumen Gentium that “the church, in Christ, is a sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race.”⁷  Picking up on this point, the Pontifical Council’s 2004 Instruction held that “foreigners are also a visible sign and an effective reminder of that universality which is a constituent element of the Catholic Church.”⁸  The Instruction later argues that it is “necessary to build up the Church and make it grow in and with. . . migrants, to rediscover together and reveal Christian values and form an authentic sacramental community of faith, worship, love and hope.”⁹  Addressing the history of racism directed at Latinos in the United States, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso wrote in a pastoral letter in 2019 that “Our Church has . . . made progress . . . . Our liturgies, with diverse language and song, more fully anticipate the diversity and unity of the Reign of God.”¹⁰

The church by its very nature is a sacrament of the unity of the human race.  Its liturgies celebrate and draw their power from the Paschal Mystery of Christ¹¹ which marks the journey of Jesus of Nazareth from death to new life.¹²  Right celebration of liturgy, therefore, must honor and welcome the migrant.  In the words of Peter Phan, “Because of its intrinsic migrantness, the church must worship in its liturgical celebrations the Deus Migrator in Jesus, the Paradigmatic Migrant.”¹³  Such celebrations of their nature denounce the hatred and bigotry by which the well-being and sometimes the very lives of migrants are sacrificed to the false gods of national or ethnic supremacy.¹⁴

¹ Pope Francis, Angelus (26 September 2021).  Text at https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2021/documents/papa-francesco_angelus_20210926.html

² Owen Cummings, Liturgical Snapshots: Reflections on the Richness of Our Worship Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 2012), 24.  Cummings is quoting Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love (New York: North Point, 2000), 62.

³ See Acts 7:6, 29; Eph 2:19; and 1Pe 2:11.  Each of these passages features a variant of paroikos.

⁴[1] See also the French paroisse, the Italian parrocchia, and the Spanish parroquia.

⁵ Pontifical Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples, Circular Letter to Episcopal Conferences “The Church and People on the Move” (1978) 1.

⁶ Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples, Instruction, “The Love of Christ Towards Migrants” (2004) 44.

⁷ Lumen Gentium 1.  I am using the text in Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014).

⁸ Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples, Instruction, “The Love of Christ Towards Migrants” (2004) 17.

⁹ Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant Peoples, Instruction, “The Love of Christ Towards Migrants” (2004) 38.  Emphasis added.

¹⁰ Mark Seitz, Bishop of El Paso, TX, “Night Will Be No More,” Pastoral Letter (13 October 2019) 40.

¹¹ See Sacrosanctum Concilium 61.

¹² Importantly, when Moses and Elijah converse with Jesus in Luke 9:31, they discuss his “departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  The word “departure” here translates the Greek term ἔξοδος = exodus.

¹³ Peter Phan, “Embracing, Protecting, and Loving the Stranger: A Roman Catholic Theology of Migration,” in Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions, eds. Peter Phan and Elaine Padilla (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100.

¹⁴ My phrasing here parallels Mark Seitz, Bishop of El Paso, TX, “Night Will Be No More,” Pastoral Letter (13 October 2019) 1.