The Church, immigrants and a program in Pomona

The Pomona Day Labor Center offers a safe space to immigrant workers, while providing the citizens in the surrounding vicinities with a well organized facility where they can hire a ready labor force any day during the week or weekend. DP

By Martha Bárcenas-Mooradian

the-tidings.com: The Catholic Church, in view of the many critical problems that humankind faces, has taken the great responsibility to delineate Gospel-based moral guidelines that reflect a deep concern about global issues that affect hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

More recently the Catholic Church has been very outspoken about immigration and has attempted to set out moral principles that will promote immigration reform and guide individual action.

This concern has been stated throughout the years in commentaries on and teachings of the Old and New Testaments. These teachings have also been expressed in a variety of documents and writings by the highest authorities of the Church:

---Pope Pius XII in his Apostolic constitution Exsul Familia (1952);

---Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963);

--- Pope John Paul in his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America (1999);

---and in a bi-national pronouncement entitled "Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope," a Pastoral Letter concerning migration from the Catholic Bishops of Mexico and the United States (2003).

Love of our neighbor has been emphasized by Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2005). The leadership of Cardinal Roger Mahony with respect to immigration reform is another example of the Catholic Church's active role in promoting social justice and fairness within the community.

The teachings of the Church reveal that through peaceful means, a just and violence-free world can be built on the basis of our faith and on the basis of expanded and stronger relationships.
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