Cura dei migranti tra pastorale della mobilità e mobilità della pastorale

The pastoral care that the Church is able to give nowadays to migrants is the result of a long-standing experience that has been able to invent, to test and to perfect structures that are increasingly suitable for satisfying the needs of the pastoral care of mobility and that proves to be effective when it promotes the mobility of pastoral care. Thanks to the Second Vatican Council, which posed the basis of an actual revolution in the pastoral care of migrants, as it gradually emerged from the post-conciliar documents, and thanks to the CIC and the CCEO, which have systematized and translated into a legal-institutional language these innovations, the Church can count on a structured pastoral care of the migrants, whose organisation after the promulgation of the Code is included in the instruction titled Erga migrantes carists Christi, which has promulgated norms regarding the pastoral care of migrants. The contribution includes the innovations of the instruction, its strengths and weaknesses. From a comprehensive examination, it emerges that the Church has developed a specific pastoral care of migrants, both of those who belong to the Latin rite and of those who belong to the Oriental rites, and it has tested flexible pastoral structures that are attentive to a pastoral care on the move. The specific pastoral care is not an anomaly that must be tolerated; the inclusion of migrants in the host ecclesial community must be carried out gradually, involving the community of departure and the one of arrival, under the responsibility of the Pastors