There’s another part of the day’s Gospel, though, and it is similarly relevant to our day and time. It’s the story of the flight into Egypt which so quickly followed the visit of the Magi — the parents fleeing to protect the newborn Savior and King. At our Bluffton convent, we display a small statue depicting Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus on this journey. We recall that the Holy Family were migrants, refugees.

That calls us back to the long-standing Jewish tradition of care for such people, repeated in Exodus and Leviticus: “When an alien resides with you in your land, do not mistreat such a one. You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lv 19:33-34). 

The journey recounted on the feast of the Innocents can remind us of family stories. My own family record includes people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany and some Iberians and Ashkenazi Jewish. When my Grandma Smith came from Germany at age 5, her parents were a cobbler and housewife. They had considerable challenges with English, so decades later, when Grandma was trying to sort something out with the U.S. government — long after she had become a citizen and her three sons had served in World War II — she was having problems with family paperwork.

I was with her one summer when I was 10 or 11 years old at a stuffy Manhattan office where she was trying to sort things out with Social Security. They had no record of her family. Her father, my great-grandfather, Heinrich Muller, was unknown in public records. An ingenious clerk listened patiently and finally decided to sort through files beginning with the letter H, discovering through verification of dates and names that their family name had been recorded as Henry.

A similar story was told to me by Sisters Teresa and Cecilia, elders in my religious community, who came from Slovakia. The family name was Juskanič, later Anglicized to Yuskanic. They informed me — with a bit of a chuckle — that whoever processed their family at Ellis Island had become so frustrated trying to figure out their names that he had recorded them as the Smith family. 

I tell these stories not because they are humorous but because they may be a cautionary tale about how bureaucratic red tape and carelessness can afflict people who have arrived more recently. By now many of us have heard horror stories about citizens who look “foreign” being detained; about a young citizen told by her university that she cannot apply for financial aid because her mother isn’t a citizen; about people sent back to their countries because of expired or missing paperwork; in our own diocese, ministering religious and clergy whose religious worker visas are up for renewal have suddenly been told they must leave the country.

The founder of the Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius community, the early sisters and their families, my Grandma and the Muller family — they all came to America on a risky journey with hopes for freedom and the better life promised in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. We need to pause and recall the stories of our own families and friends, as well as the stories of the Israelites in Egypt and the Holy Family that found refuge there. 

We have saints who were immigrants: John Neumann and Mother Cabrini among them. There are sojourners and strangers throughout salvation history and the history of our nation. We are living in a time when it seems to have become acceptable, perversely so, to demonize immigrants, migrants and refugees.

Dec. 28 is a time to recall that major criminal acts of our time, the slaughter of innocents and dehumanizing treatment of those who don’t look or speak as many of us do, cry out to our Messiah and Lord. He, after all, understands all too well, by his own human experience, that “more tortuous than anything is the human heart, beyond remedy” (Jer 17:9) and “man’s inhumanity to man” (Robert Burns).