Introduction

“Insight into Future Events. . .”:¹

Bishop Scalabrini and the Pastoral Care

of Today’s Migrants

Migrations: Old and New Questions

Migrations provoke intense and ambivalent emotions in the current debate the international community carries on through its representative organisms and within each state. In the press, in electoral campaigns, in legislative proposals of parliaments and in the procedures of public administration, the climate easily overheats when attention focuses on immigrants. This fact is not new, however. Migrations are an issue that

emerges time and again with regularity in modern history. In fact it is a component of major importance throughout history and critical in recent times to understand the industrialization process, the colonial expansion of the European powers, the demographic transition of Western countries as well as the economic development and the political hegemony of others. It is no surprise then that the impact and the transforming capacity of the migratory phenomenon continues to be felt. Not only emigrate arms for work and exiles paralyzed by fear in search of a temporary refuge from war and oppression: persons move, and with them cultures and religions, traditions, habits and customs of life that make receiving societies a microcosm of the world with an internal pluralism and with global links always more significant.

Once again an urgent political priority, migrations today evoke feelings of rejection and fear of what is different and new, of the “other” who threatens my wellbeing. They also reawaken consciences to the demands of international solidarity in the sight of the injustices and sufferings that often accompany uprooted people.

United States Bureau of the Census demographers not only point out that almost a million new immigrants arrive every year, but also anticipate that the number of Hispanic residents will reach more than 36 million by 2005. Europe with its 15 million immigrants of various cultures, races and religions is not the only continent that questions itself over a social fact that challenges historical identities and acquired security. On all the roads of the world, masses of migrants and refugees move searching for survival, pushed by the desire of a more dignified life. The United Nations, where the request for a world conference on migrations has been under exam, for a while estimates at least 125 million the number of persons that legally or not and for a variety of reasons live and work in a country different than the one where they were born.² Italy too, though on a lesser scale than the rest of the European Union, is not foreign to the tensions and questions raised by a million immigrants on its territory. It is directly experimenting with what it means to be at the same time

a country of emigration and immigration, and how the memory of some 30 million Italian emigrants in a little over the span of a century may serve as a strong lesson in opening up to understanding and welcome.

With due account for the diversity found in various countries and geographical regions, migrations have become a structural and permanent aspect of modern societies. The Church could not have remained indifferent before the pastoral and ethical issues raised by migrations and emerging when one thinks about their causes and the consequences that impact individual migrants, their families, the country left behind and the new societies within which they settled. In fact, and often ahead of Governments’ action, the Church immediately took the side of migrants since the beginning of the great mass migrations of the XIXth century; it recognized from the start their complexity, and it included them in the development of its social doctrine and of its pastoral action.

Bishop John Baptist Scalabrini served as a catalyst to mobilize the Church and he helped her to move forward on this double track of doctrine and action toward the end of the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth century. The intellectual alertness and the pastoral dynamism of Bishop Scalabrini greatly contributed to start a systematic coordination of the Church’s teaching and policy regarding human mobility, a contribution in large part still valid.³

With the persistence of migrations, different and more complex to be sure, a new presentation of the thinking of Bishop Scalabrini constitutes an original stimulus, and not just for Catholics, to advance both understanding and commitment for a peaceful and enriching coexistence.