Hospitality and Emerging Populations: Toward a Theology of Migration in the Context of the Catholic Church in the United States

In Christian communities in the United States today, the reception of Latino/a immigrants is often influenced by the negative and dehumanizing rhetoric advanced in the public arena, creating marginalization, exclusion, and division within those communities. There is a dire need for an ethic of resistance and solidarity that rejects that rhetoric and the damage it leaves in its wake. This thesis thus proposes a theology of migration that employs hospitality as its entry point, and that speaks to the engagement between receiving communities and those migrating. An identification and analysis of the anti-immigrant rhetoric will serve as the context and point of departure for the remainder of the project. After calling for a metanoia from that which is contrary to God’s mission of healing, reconciliation, and justice, the search for solutions draws upon Catholic social teaching, scripture, and tradition, and proposes a recovery of the tradition and understanding of early Christian hospitality as the catalyst for a theology of migration. Although hospitality was once an honored virtue and a moral imperative, for the people of God, whose formative experiences were marked by migration and exile, hospitality was also a sacred duty, a response to God’s own grace and hospitality, and a means of welcoming strangers and those who were marginalized into the community. Yet today’s receiving communities no longer have that shared remembrance of vulnerability and displacement, and our present understanding of hospitality is too often operative within dynamics that reinforce divisions, power, and privilege. The thesis thus offers a critique of privilege and power, utilizing sources from missiology, and postcolonial and liberation theologies. Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi envisions hospitality and migration as the basis for sacramental unity, and the migrant as the co-builder of community. It also proposes that hospitality is practically marked by the vocation to be in exile. Using that capstone document as an orienting vision, this thesis argues that a theology of migration must seek solidarity across difference in a spirit of reconciliation, be rooted in vulnerability and grace, and embody the practices and virtues of hospitality.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD