The Howling Year

American Catholics and Migration

Recently, I was struck by two lines from a translation of a poem by Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti:

Sometimes a year looks back and howls

then it drops to its knees. 

2025 is not yet done, but I am sure it will be on its knees, howling, by the end.

As I write, Trump has just posted another hate-filled rant about immigrants, instructing his government to further restrict the legal pathways to immigration to the United States by halting migration from many countries, stopping asylum proceedings, rescinding green cards, and denaturalizing citizens.

The American Catholic Church is a church built on the backs of migrants—European, Latin American, Asian, African—every person in the pew has a migration story in their past. (Me too.)

The American church has long served as a waystation on the path to assimilation, an Ellis Island of the soul that allowed the weary traveler to rest and replenish while doing the hard work to become American.

Formally and informally, the church has supported migrants and engaged in resettlement work since its inception.

Critics of the present church note that this has turned into a revenue stream—the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Jesuit Refugee Service had contracts with the US federal government to provide basic services to refugees that were recently terminated.

The majority of American Catholics agree that “America’s openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation.”

American Catholics are standing up to the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions, with American bishops releasing a statement in mid-November that reads,

Catholic teaching exhorts nations to recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants. We bishops advocate for a meaningful reform of our nation’s immigration laws and procedures. Human dignity and national security are not in conflict. Both are possible if people of good will work together.

Priests and nuns are going to immigration courts. Laypeople are joining anti-ICE whistle patrols in their neighborhoods. In October, a delegation of priests and nuns bringing Communion to detainees in the Broadview ICE facility was denied entry. They held a Mass outside the facility, singing hymns loudly in the hopes that detainees would hear them.

Pope Leo XIV is providing the moral compass for the moment, commenting frequently this fall in the press about the need for the compassionate treatment of migrants and the imperative to follow the rule of law.

The American Catholic Church has foundered in recent decades and alienated many Catholics. Here is a moment in time to recenter itself on core values of compassion, tolerance, and love.

Let’s return to Miklós Radnóti. He was born Jewish. In 1943, while conscripted to a labor battalion of the Royal Hungarian Army, he and his wife converted to Catholicism. They were not the first conversos to seek refuge under the cross. It was useless. In 1944, he was driven from the copper mine where he labored in a forced march to flee the advancing Allied armies. Two months into the march, he was shot by soldiers of the Royal Hungarian Army and buried in a mass grave.

All that, after he heard the year howl. In America, we can hear our year howling. What will be next for us?