Highlights from Cardinal Robert McElroy’s homily in Washington DC at the Mass for the 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees:

But this year is different from the one hundred ten years that have preceded it. For this year we are confronting – both as a nation and as a Church – an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst.

Our first obligation as a Church is to embrace in a sustained, unwavering, prophetic and compassionate way the immigrants who are suffering so deeply because of the oppression they are facing. Our Catholic community here in Washington has witnessed many people of deep faith, integrity and compassion who have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed in our nation….

For the undocumented community of our Archdiocese, your daily witness of faith and family, hard work and sacrifice, compassion and love is a profound reflection of the deepest virtues of our faith and the most noble aspirations of our nation. The theme of today’s procession is hope amidst adversity, and in these days of deep suffering you give us an example of transforming hope and a resiliency that is founded upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whose cross symbolizes at its core suffering amidst injustice, and the recognition that in our moments of deepest hardship, our God stands with us.

We are witnessing a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history. This assault seeks to make life unbearable for undocumented immigrants. It is willing to tear families apart, separating grieving mothers from their children, and fathers from the sons and daughters who are the center of their lives. It embraces as collateral damage the horrific emotional suffering that is being thrust on children who were born here, but now face the terrible choice of losing their parents or leaving the only country that they have ever known….

In the very same way, for us as believers and citizens, our obligation regarding undocumented women and men is to ask ourselves: Are they truly our neighbor? Is the mother who sacrifices in every dimension of her life to nurture children who will live rightly, productively and caringly our neighbor? Is the man being deported despite the fact that he has three sons who serve in the marines because of the values he taught them our neighbor? Is the woman who works to provide home care for our sick and elderly parents our neighbor? Is the young adult who came here as a child and loves this nation as the only country he has ever known our neighbor? Is the undocumented woman who contributes tirelessly to our parish, caring for the church, leading the daily rosary our neighbor?

In the Gospel today Jesus demands that the central perspective we must bring to understanding the moral legitimacy of the campaign of fear and deportation being waged in our country today springs from the bonds of community that have come to tie us together as neighbors, not the question of whether sometime in their past individuals broke a law by entering or remaining in the United States.