The church, migration and the effects on the family
A Chaldean Catholic couple and their children recently spent nights over the course of two months sleeping on their home’s roof in an Iraqi village.
Oct 24, 2014
By David Gibson
A Chaldean Catholic couple and their children recently spent nights over the course of two months sleeping on their home’s roof in an Iraqi village. They kept watch for “the flashing lights” of approaching Islamic State shellings, Catholic News Service reported Sept. 9.
They thought that “if there was an attack, we could see it coming and evacuate to save ourselves,” the father explained. Ultimately, the family resettled temporarily in Lebanon.
Imagine fearing continually that the children closest to you might die in the next armed air or ground attacks launched upon your neighborhood. That is the frightening reality so many parents in the Middle East face.
Families in combat zones everywhere are fearful. Couples have much to lose, including each other. Parents know their children could be killed or maimed, or else exploited for gain by the forces of violence.
The risk remains, too, that in fleeing violence – losing home and homeland – families will end up separated for very long periods.
Families contend with similar risks in zones of drug-cartel and gang violence in Central America and other regions.
When warfare or social violence becomes local, parents agonize.
Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of Antioch told a September meeting in Washington about a Syrian Christian father whose wife and two children were murdered, and their bodies thrown down a well.
Quoted by Catholic News Service, the patriarch described encountering a boy, who with others fleeing violence took refuge in a small church hall in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Opening his arms, the boy exclaimed, “We have no place!”
The well-being of children such as the one described makes its way into today’s news reporting. But does it become a top war-related concern for us?
Pope Francis definitely had children high in mind when he spoke in the Vatican Gardens during an “invocation for peace” in the Middle East ceremony June 8. He was joined by Israel’s then-President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Our world is “on loan to us from our children ... who plead with us to tear down the walls of enmity and to set out on the path of dialogue and peace,” the pope said. Too many of these children “have been innocent victims of war and violence, saplings cut down at the height of their promise,” he added.
Remembering these children instills “the courage of peace, the strength to persevere undaunted in dialogue,” he added.
The church is greatly concerned about the effects on families of combat and forced migrations. In the working document for the extraordinary assembly of the world Synod of Bishops on the family held Oct. 5-19 in Vatican City, the Vatican Synod Secretariat indicated it had heard much about these concerns.
Voices in the church, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, described “the impact of war on the family, causing violent deaths and the destruction of homes, and forcing people to abandon everything,” the secretariat reported.
Others recommended that the synod address “the impact of migration” on families, including the separations that so often result for them.
Families deserve the church’s “attentive pastoral care” and the wider social community’s support, the Catholic bishops of the border regions between Mexico and the US states of Texas and New Mexico said in November 2013. This is “particularly true” when the family “must bear the great strain of destabilizing social, political and economic forces.”
In February, “the 17-year-old nephew of a Catholic Relief Services’ staff member was gunned down” with a friend in Honduras after refusing to join a gang, said Richard Jones, a CRS official. CRS is the international relief agency of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Jones testified July 16 before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on the reasons Central American children were arriving in great numbers at the US border. For example, he explained:
“We have seen an increase of the gangs using children to distribute drugs in Honduras or to watch for police or others in the barrios of San Salvador and Guatemala City.”
In desperation, youths and families primarily are fleeing “violence, not poverty,” said Jones.
He described innovative CRS programmes in the region, ranging from reducing child labor and helping street children attend school “to providing essential life and job skills” for at-risk youths.
Pope Francis encourages the church to draw near suffering families.
“Suffering is powerful,” and when “we draw closer, we help one another greatly,” he commented during an in-flight press conference while returning from South Korea to Rome in August.
Asked why he took time in Korea to meet families who lost loved ones in the April 16 Sewol ferry disaster that took some 300 lives, principally teenagers, he responded:
“I am a priest, and I feel the need to draw near. ... I know that the comfort that any word of mine might give is no cure; it doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but human closeness at these times gives us strength, there is solidarity.”
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