Catholic Church and Migration

"Ferdinando Baldelli, Ernesto Schiaparelli e le scuole italiane nel Nord America", in Sistemi educativi e politiche culturali dal mondo antico al contemporaneo. Studi offerti a Gabriella Ciampi, a cura di Maddalena Vallozza e Gian Maria Di Nocera, Viterbo, Sette Città - Università degli Studi della Tuscia (collana Daidalos), 2019, pp. 15-19, ISBN: 978-88-7853-846-7

One of the great and oldest global challenges today is migration. Since ages humanity has been migrating. There are some 232 million people— lived outside their country of origin.  The magnitude and complexity of international migration makes it an important force in development and a high-priority issue for both developing and developed countries. The fact that about half of all migrants are women, most of reproductive age, is another reason this a pressing issue for United Nations Population Funds, the UNFPA.  How does the church respond to this highly prioritized issue called Migration?

The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more witnesses be present at the marriage (1563), but neglected to specify who the parish priest was. The decrees provoked confusion among both laymen and churchmen. Traces thereof can be found in the hitherto essentially unexplored documentation of The Congregation of the Council. This institution was founded in 1564 specifically to resolve the questions that arose all over the catholic world by the application of the decrees promulgated at Trent. The related records are held in the Vatican Secret Archive. Through an examination of this documentation, complemented by files of the Holy Office the author analyzes how the new rules were understood, experienced, used, circumvented, and manipulated both by laymen and churchmen in order to end an unwanted marriage, to facilitate a union that was socially transgressive, opposed by family, or even heterodox, and to respond to pastoral concerns.

The main sources for my article are the files concerning dispensations for mixed marriages held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Holy Office). My article analyses the tension between two Roman Catholic attitudes toward Catholic women in mixed marriages: the hope that they would serve a missionary role, on the one hand, and the fear that they would succumb to heresy, on the other. Debates within the Holy Office over granting these dispensations show that both conceptions had ancient roots, the first going back to the Roman era, the second to the twelfth century, and then particularly emphasised after the Council of Trent. Studies of mixed marriages in Protestant end Orthodox regions suggest many similarities to the Catholic policies examined here, both regarding the woman’s missionary function and especially regarding the risk of the woman’s apostasy and the meth-ods developed to avoid this.

The Catholic Church experienced its first phase of large expansion in the United States only in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Until that moment, Catholic people had been excluded from the early American history events. At the turn of the twentieth century, migrations toward the United States spurred the expansion of Catholicism in the Country, and the Catholic Church developed in an Protestant environment. The necessity of having an institutional structure convinced its first bishop to choose the Trustees corporation system. As a result, the relationship between lay people and Catholic priests began to resemble those between laymen and priests of the other Christian denominations. Such an Americanised Church became the reference point for millions of Catholic immigrants, toward whom it had a dual role, of inclusion and distinction. It was mostly through parish schools that immigrants started to be instructed on US society, costumes, and language. The present paper shortly reconstructs this story.

This paper attempts to explore the impact and extent of Kuwait's religious freedom in encouraging the accumulation of social capital for the migration workers community in Kuwait. Although Kuwait's constitution states that Islam is the state religion, numerous faith groups coexist with the majority Sunni and minority Shiite population in Kuwait. Kuwait's relatively high degree of religious freedom compared to the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries has contributed to the exponential increase in the number of non-citizen Christian population over the years. This book chapter focuses on the Filipino migration workers' worship community to analyze the relationship between ethnic church and the formation of social capital in the context of Kuwait's religious freedom. The chapter concludes that Kuwait's migration churches lag behind other comparable social and cultural entities that coexist in the city as the worship communities fail to accumulate the necessary social capital geared toward improving their civic nature. The level of information and trust embedded at the church membership's associational level is extremely high, but the community lacks an agent to translate this potential into actuality.