Must people be ‘like us’ for us to have compassion?
While strolling downtown in Philadelphia on a recent afternoon, I came upon the Irish Memorial on Front and Chestnut streets. It depicts a boatload of people escaping from the Great Hunger in Ireland in 18401850. A million Irish men, women and children starved to death during that time. Another million emigrated, the majority of them to the United States. I couldn’t help but make the connection between the plight of the Irish then and the plight of the refugees seeking shelter in our country today. Many Americans are afraid of immigrants today. Were we afraid of them in the 1840s?
The Irish immigrants getting off the boat at Ellis Island had left everything in their homeland to seek food at the very least. They spoke English with a Gaelic lilt, and must have heard tales of how this would make them unwelcome. The “Nativists” — those who had emigrated here before the Irish — felt threatened by these waves of newcomers who might take their jobs, marry their daughters and sons, and were even members of a different religion — Catholic vs. Protestant. Both the immigrants and the people in the country they were entering had fears. If we do not acknowledge both fears and try to empathize with them, we will never resolve the division that is going on country today.
In 1844, when droves of these Irish immigrants were arriving in Philadelphia, the church where I serve presently (St. Augustine Parish at Fourth and Vine streets) was burned down in anti-Catholic riots. The finest theological library in the country, housed in the Augustinian rectory there, was piled in the street and reduced to ashes in a bonfire while the “nativist” crowds cheered. Just two years before this, the St. Augustine Academy (boys’ school), run by the parish, was moved to a safe place far out in the country — Radnor Township — where it became the foundation for Villanova University. Both the Irish immigrants and the “Nativists” were afraid, but was there no way to address their fears except through violence? One result was the Philadelphia police force being established after these riots. Have we learned anything from that time — other than police forces — that could help us understand and reconcile the different “sides” in the immigration struggle today?
A crucial question arises: Must people be “like us” in order for us to have compassion? And how alike must they be? Apparently being white and fellow Christians wasn’t enough in the 1840s. Today’s differences are greater: Color of skin, born in a different continent, and perhaps the greatest for many of the current immigrants — they are a completely different in our religion than most of us. We need to acknowledge these differences and the fears they create or we will wind up with more than burned-down churches. Instead of our leaders accentuating what divides us, they must help us claim what joins us — our common humanity.
My mother’s mother, Maggie Harley, escaped the poverty and starvation in Ireland to come to America in 1890 when she was 16 years old. She told us she had only a chunk of peat moss, a slab of bacon (tossed overboard because it went rancid after a few days at sea) and a shillelagh to remember her homeland. I wonder what Maggie would say about our obsessive fear about new immigrants — Muslims, Mexicans and others a little browner than she was. Her first instinct, like ours, might be, “Sure ‘n now build a wall.” Yet if she remembered where she came from it would melt some of that fear of differences that we all have. Hunger joins all of us. She might even try to make a home for them, and share a meal with these fellow human beings, fleeing even worse circumstances than she did so long ago. The words of a poem on the side of the Irish Memorial sculpture in Philadelphia show us this way to remember:
On reading this poem, the last few lines draw us in and ask: In our current fear that impels us to circle the wagons to keep strangers out of our country, why can’t we remember these Irish and other immigrants? Often seen as a threat to those here before them, they ultimately became the wonderfully varied and talented “melting pot” that makes our beloved country truly great. God, help us today … to find in the hungry and lost, not a different race…but the faces of our ancestors … an image of ourselves?