Catholic Migrant Identity in Church Life Journal
Below is an excerpt of the promised essay version of my presentation on Catholic Migrant Identity After Augustine, Bonaventure & Ratzinger, which started as a presentation earlier this year at Campion College Australia (see the video of that presentation here). To jump straight to the full essay, click here.
A decade ago, I made a move from Australia to the United States and served for a year as a visiting research Professor at DePaul University. This brief period of migration—one overlaid on my experience of already being a migrant to Australia—provided an experiential backdrop to what would later become my major research project that year, focusing on a theological account of migrant identity.
In this context I found that the fifth-century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo—arguably the Church’s foremost migrant thinker—provided the key theological backdrop to the research that would unfold. That link between Augustinian theology and migrant identity would continue to occupy me long after I finished up in the United States and took on new twists and turns, when I had occasion to delve more deeply into the works of a second Augustinian theologian, the late Joseph Ratzinger, whose links to Augustine are apparent in his works on love and in his interest in a third Augustinian theologian, the Franciscan Doctor of the Church St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio.
In what follows, I will lay out some broad brushstrokes of the research on a theological engagement with Catholic migrant identity, and arrange this presentation around the three thinkers mentioned above: Augustine, Bonaventure, and Ratzinger. In elaborating the thought of each I also hope to weave three points through the argumentation. First, I highlight how an Augustinian theology of love forms one important golden thread connecting all three thinkers, a golden thread that helps us make sense of migrant identity, in particular Catholic migrant identity. Second, I identify the search for a home outside one’s place of origin as the connecting Augustinian theme that also helps us understand Catholic migrant identity. Finally, I argue that the experiences of the Catholic migrant forms a mirror that reflects back upon the experiences of every Catholic.
Augustine
When talking about migrant identity and Augustine, what is often brought up is the idea in his City of God, in which the City of God sojourns as a pilgrim through the City of Man. What often follows is the shorthand of “pilgrim equals migrant” which, because it is shorthand, overlooks something more theologically foundational.
To this, we need to consider Augustine’s Confessions. In particular, we should consider his most oft-quoted line found in the opening chapter of the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee” (I.1.1). This one line encapsulates the most foundational claim of Christian anthropology, and frames the puzzle of the Catholic migrant: before we are thinkers, we are restless lovers. For Augustine, as well as Bonaventure and Ratzinger, all theological thinking begins with the heart that loves, for love underwrites our conception of self and gives direction to our thoughts, words, and deeds.
A very deliberate tie can be made between this directive power of love and migrant identity. This tie is apparent to migrants who made their transitus to their country of domicile after their formative years in their country of origin. More to the point, it is most viscerally felt when…
