Catholic Migrants: Shift

This is the second instalment of a pair of posts looking at Ratzinger’s coverage of Israel’s choice for a personal over a geographical God, and the implications of those observations for Catholic Migrant identity.

In last week’s post, I sought to problematise Catholic migrant identity, and argued that Ratzinger’s coverage of Israel’s choice for a personal God acted as an important key to understanding the kinds of shifts that Catholic migrant identity would be undergo. In this post, I seek to lay out those shifts.

In my paper on the matter, I argued that Israel’s option for a personal over a geographical God underwrites the shift in axis the Catholic migrant may undergo. It is not only sociologically acceptable to want community as a locus of stability, it may even be theologically imperative for the Catholic migrant to make a shift in loci of stability, not in terms of shifting from one territory to another, but in terms of shifting from a geographical plane to what Ratzinger called in his Introduction, the “plane of I and you”, where it is the relationship of one person to another, rather than geography, that constituted a locus of stability. This shift in the axis of relating to God, Ratzinger said, was the indispensable basis for the faith of not only Israel, but those of the New Covenant.

Indeed, later on, Ratzinger notes the necessity of precisely this shift in axis for the life of the Christian in Pope Benedict’s encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi. In paragraph 31, Benedict makes the crucial link between God’s kingdom, God’s personal love and our locus of stability. In Benedict’s own words

His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us… His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is “truly” life.

What Ratzinger foreshadows, Benedict makes explicit, and what Benedict makes explicit, captures what the Catholic migrant aspires to in making the aforementioned shifts in axis, a locus of stability grounded in the gift and reception of love between persons. The shift in axis takes place, I argue, on three levels. On a theological level, this means a shift from a land towards the person of Jesus Christ who, as Augustine put it in sermon 123, is also the place we are ultimately going to. On a pastoral level, it could mean a fine-tuning of the migrant’s locus of stability to the persons in the community of believers in the country of domicile. At a spiritual level, I argue that if the God of Israel retains a boundless potency, as Ratzinger puts it, it also has implications for the spiritual life of the migrant who can, in times of vulnerability, be exposed to the temptation of nostalgia for lands past, presuming that God was only faithful to his promises in that past territorial context.

If God is illimitable, the spiritual challenge for the migrant would be to hold fast to their relationship with the person of God and trusting in his providence wherever the migrant is planted.

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