EVERYBODY'S CHALLENGE - Jesuit Refugee Service | USA

A characteristically Ignatian approach
Ignatius and his friends, when receiving the displaced people of
the Roman campagna into their house, attached great importance to
begging alms on their behalf, carrying on their own backs the daily
rations of firewood and food, preparing the meals and washing
the sick. They not only wished to live poorly, they wanted to live
with and serve the poor. And at night, the reformed priests, as they
were known in Rome because of their exemplary lives, gathered the
refugees to instruct them in the faith and help them prepare for
the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist. This integral
response to the needs of the poor, physical and spiritual, based on
personal presence in their midst, has been found a most helpful
pastoral approach in our present-day service to refugees. It helps us
to perceive needs in their lives which might otherwise remain concealed,
and it can sometimes lead us to reverse our priorities.
The first thing Jesuits working with refugees in Central America,
Africa and Asia tell me they discovered, is this: Anybody who has
not actually been a refugee must approach the subject with great
caution and respect, lest he misjudge the reasons why a person was
compelled to flee. This is of especial importance in the context of the
current debate on the distinction between political refugees and ‘economic
migrants’. The great majority of today’s refugees are fleeing
from highly complex situations in which their lives are threatened
by multiple dangers and which make it almost impossible to distinguish
between extreme poverty, famine, political repression, armed
conflict and other forms of violence, which, for many, include prolonged
and at times unbelievably cruel physical and psychological
torture. People escaping from such conditions are often described as
‘economic migrants’. They are not fleeing from persecution, it is argued,
but seeking a better life. This reasoning is somewhat artificial
and tends to reflect the attempt by those propounding it to justify
their harsh treatment of refugees rather than the actual conditions
from which refugees try to escape. For how can a refugee prove, as he
must in order to be recognised as a political refugee, his well-founded
fear of persecution to sometimes unsympathetic officials who have
never experienced such fear themselves and who may have no personal
knowledge of the country from which the refugee is fleeing?
Poverty and famine may, technically, not constitute a form of perse-
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