By Mark Zimmermann
Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan shows today’s Christians how to respond to current government policies impacting immigrants and the poor, Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy said at a March 24 conference on migrants and refugees.
Washington’s new archbishop was among the speakers at the gathering in the nation’s capital on “Catholic Social Teaching and Work with Migrants and Refugees at a Time of Uncertainty” that was hosted by Jesuit Refugee Service/USA and the Center for Migration Studies of New York.
Cardinal McElroy noted Pope Francis’s Feb. 11 letter to the nation’s bishops – in which the pontiff addressed what he called “the major crisis” of the Trump administration’s program of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
“Pope Francis brought to the fore the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that herein lies the heart of Catholic moral teaching and Catholic social teaching and understanding what are our obligations toward the stranger, the other, who are actually our brother and sister, and I would like today to focus in a spiritual and moral way in a reflection on that parable, and what the implications of it are for us today,” the cardinal said.