How can we work with immigrants to evangelise our society?
Finally, how can we work with immigrants to evangelise our society? Some people see no future for the Western Church in its current form: they believe it will be taken over totally by the new movements, or by the more vibrant churches of the southern hemisphere.
Surely the question, both with the movements and with immigrant Christians, is not to see them in competition but in partnership, learning from each other. To take specific examples, setting up separate churches for immigrants, unless the circumstances are exceptional, benefits neither them nor the host Church. “Solving the vocations crisis” by handing over large tracts of a diocese to immigrant priests is simply going to cause more problems, which is not to deny the great value of immigrant clergy.
Work in partnership together in these and other areas is no doubt more arduous, but also more true to the spirit of what it means to be Catholic. No passage of Scripture brings this out more clearly than Eph. 2.19-22:
“So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”
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