Bigotry with a Brogue

A bonfire with an effigy of migrants in a boat before it was set on fire this month in Northern Ireland. Google Image

A story in last week’s news was about a beautiful town in Northern Ireland called Ballymena. I happen to have visited there years ago with my long-time, dear friend, Fr. Gerald Waris, whose maternal grandfather was from the town.

Ballymena evidently has long been a hot bed of religious strife. I vividly recall that one of Gerald’s relatives, who was Catholic, told us that a committee of men had to spend nights in the parish church to keep anti-Catholics from defacing it.

Now comes another type of strife – one to which Americans can better relate: anti-immigrant bigotry. Rioters and masked thugs have burned buildings, including immigrant homes, in and around Ballymena. A huge effigy of a boatload of immigrants was also set afire.

Millions of Irish Emigrants

The irony here is that Ireland, including Northern Ireland whence Gerald, and my ancestors hailed, was among the European countries from which millions of emigrants sought refuge in places like the U.S. and Canada, where they often suffered from bigotry and injustice. 

Why do we humans have such a hard time accepting, and loving, “the other,” people who appear to be unlike us? I recall years ago travelling to southern Texas to volunteer at a facility that helped refugees who had crossed the southern border. The biggest opposition to the migrants among the people of the town came from Hispanic Americans, many of whom had themselves been immigrants.

Google Image

Like many Americans who years ago opposed the Irish, Germans, Italians and other mostly poor immigrants from Europe, the Hispanic Americans in the town had gotten their piece of the American “pie” and had no problem trying to keep others from getting theirs.

A silver lining in the story about Ballymena in the New York Times was the comment that the vast majority of Irish accept immigrants - which appears to be more than can be said for the majority of Americans.

That’s why it’s necessary for people of faith, and people searching for God, to speak out on behalf of the just and loving treatment of migrants and refugees and treatment of our own poor – not because of politics or ideology but because the Christian faith, and other faiths, compel it.

“For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me…” says Jesus in Matthew’s gospel.

A few weeks ago, 20 U.S. Catholic bishops signed onto an interfaith effort opposing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued its strongest statement to date criticizing the bill.

Cutting Health Care for the Poor

Analysts have said proposals in the bill could cut Medicaid funding — health care for the poor — by as much as $880 billion over 10 years. That would strip health coverage from as many as 16 million Americans and lead to about 50,000 preventable deaths each year.

Wrote Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the bishops' conference: "...It is the responsibility of politicians to promote and protect the common good, including by working to overcome great wealth inequality. This bill … takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”

Pope Leo was recently also quoted as saying about migrants: “All of us, in the course of our lives, can find ourselves healthy or sick, employed or unemployed, living in our native land or in a foreign country, yet our dignity always remains unchanged: It is the dignity of a creature willed and loved by God.”