Viewpoint: Care for migrants - extinguish hatred!

As a Catholic chaplaincy dedicated to the pastoral care of LGBT+ Catholics, with multiple migrants and asylum seekers in our communities and worshipping congregation, we cannot help but express our concern at the current round of arrests, detention, and deportation of migrants and refugees. Pope Francis teaches that we "cannot be indifferent to suffering; we cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast. Instead, we should feel indignant, challenged to emerge from our comfortable isolation and to be changed by our contact with human suffering" (Fratelli tutti, No. 68). In this spirit, both our work and our Catholic identity bids us to speak out.

Firstly, migrants and refugees are often some of the most vulnerable people among us. It is our duty to welcome and care for them. Arresting them (in itself a violent act), subjecting them to harmful detention practices and unfit accommodation, and deporting them to unsafe destinations fails in this moral responsibility.

Second, we note that many migrants and refugees are LGBT+ people. Among various other harms, their detainment subjects them to the imprisonment, and their deportation places them at risk of the very persecution they may have come to Britain to avoid. This is utterly incompatible with any authentic concern for LGBT+ people, their welfare, and their rights.

Third, we are concerned with how the government's current policy places the Civil Service in a position of untenable conflict of interest. Forcing the Service to break international law harms an institution vital to the functioning of our country, and therein the country as a whole. We are also concerned for the individual civil servants who are made moral victims in this.

In this context, we recognise that the government's intention is, in part, to discourage dangerous illegal channel crossings. This is laudable. However, good intentions cannot justify an inherently unjust policy.

As Catholics, we are committed to a vision of society ordered towards the Common Good, or "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily". Such a society is one that respects the intrinsic dignity of all people, and the moral responsibilities which flow from it. Care for migrants and refugees is an indispensable part of this.

In the words of Pope Francis: "Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths of dialogue and not by constructing new walls". We urge the government to respond to this vocation, and reverse its current course of action.