Catholic Migrants: Puzzle

This is the first 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.

I’m a couple of weeks out of presenting my paper on Catholic Migrant Identity at a conference organised by the University of Notre Dame Australia, on the legacy of Benedict XVI.

A number of readers would have remembered my trilogy of posts on the impact of Joseph Ratzinger’s coverage of Israel’s choice for a personal over a geographical God, which he considered in his Introduction to Christianity. The reflections in those posts formed the basis for my analysis of the experience of the Catholic migrant.

What Ratzinger highlighted in his Introduction, I thought, built upon a puzzle on migrant identity, which was the research project I did ten years before while a Visiting Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism & Intercultural Theology at DePaul, which is run by Prof. William Cavanaugh. That project then became part of the volume Scattered and Gathered, edited by Prof. Michael Budde.

In my first project, I relied heavily on Augustine’s theology of the multiplicity of loves in the heart of one stricken from original innocence. I used that motif to highlight how migrants experience a multiplication of geographical affiliations when stricken from one’s homeland. Ten years on, however, I realised that a subtler challenge faces the migrant, for the most immediate interface for the country of domicile is not geography, but the persons that live within. It is not simply that the locus of stability has to shift, but that the axis for that locus must shift as well. 

Things get more complicated when we consider Catholic migrant identity. When identity is refracted through a faith tradition, migrant identity assumes a very different shape from those that are not so refracted. At one level, faith traditions partially address the need of finding a locus of stability in the country of domicile that is not strictly speaking geographical. The puzzle then concerns concerns the axis from the territorial to the personal.

In my trilogy of posts from last year, I laid out the implications of Israel’s choice for a personal over a geographical God as expounded by Ratzinger. He showed how the shift from a geographical to a personal God, led to a shift in basis of religious affiliation. The argument in my paper was that what Ratzinger lays out can track with the kinds of shifts that Catholic migrants may undergo.

These will be laid out in next week’s post.

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