Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan shows today’s Christians how to respond to current government policies impacting immigrants and the poor, Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy said at a March 24 conference on migrants and refugees.
Washington’s new archbishop was among the speakers at the gathering in the nation’s capital on “Catholic Social Teaching and Work with Migrants and Refugees at a Time of Uncertainty” that was hosted by Jesuit Refugee Service/USA and the Center for Migration Studies of New York.
Cardinal McElroy noted Pope Francis’s Feb. 11 letter to the nation’s bishops – in which the pontiff addressed what he called “the major crisis” of the Trump administration’s program of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
“Pope Francis brought to the fore the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that herein lies the heart of Catholic moral teaching and Catholic social teaching and understanding what are our obligations toward the stranger, the other, who are actually our brother and sister, and I would like today to focus in a spiritual and moral way in a reflection on that parable, and what the implications of it are for us today,” the cardinal said.
Then Cardinal McElroy read the account of the Parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke 10:25-37, in which a man was beaten by robbers and left on the roadside. A priest and Levite passed by him, but a Samaritan traveler, moved by compassion, lifted him up and cared for him and took him to an innkeeper.
Cardinal McElroy referenced how Pope Francis, in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti on human fraternity, examined each of the figures in the Good Samaritan parable, pointing out how the priest and the Levite had indifference and fear in their hearts that caused them to walk past the suffering man.
“Indifference is the fact that each of us becomes so preoccupied with our own well-being and concerns and needs, that we cease to be compassionate in a compelling and deep and profound and Christ-like sense of that word,” the cardinal said. He added, “I think we have to wrestle with this figure of the priest and the Levite in our own hearts and souls, because all of us at times shut ourselves out from that compassion which Christ calls us to. Part of this is because there is so much suffering that surrounds us. We’ve got to remember, the call of Jesus is constant, to always be attentive to the needs and suffering that lie around us, to perceive it, and then to act.”
Cardinal McElroy pointed out how Pope Francis also reflected on the suffering victim on the side of the road. “Each of us, Francis says, at times in this world is the victim. Each of us goes through suffering in our lives through which we feel others are merely passing by, not paying attention, in which each of us feel alone in our suffering, and others are merely passing by,” the cardinal said. “And it is important, Francis says, to understand the parable, to recognize this experience in our own lives, because only when we do so, can we see ourselves in right relationship with the Good Samaritan… the one who saves us.”
The cardinal then noted Pope Francis’s reflection on the robbers in the parable. “Francis says each of us in our own lives is also the robber, each of us at times victimizes others consciously in a variety of different ways, when we place our own interests and well-being ahead of others and truly cause harm. We must be in touch with that side of ourselves and with the darkness which is the robber inside every one of us, and recognize that is one of the great calls of Christian conversion, to root out that darkness, to face it where it lies and to fight against it always.”
Washington’s archbishop noted how the parable sheds light on the impact of the Trump administration’s moves to shut down the support provided to the world’s poor by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“If we look at the figure of the robber, at this moment, I think we must say to ourselves quite clearly and categorically, that the suspension of Agency for International Development monies for humanitarian relief is moral theft from the poorest and most desperate men, women and children in our world today. It is unconscionable through any prism of Catholic thought,” Cardinal McElroy said.
He said those working in outreach to migrants and refugees understand that the government’s budgetary support for programs meeting the “desperate humanitarian needs of the world is our obligation as people of faith and as a nation.”
Officials from Caritas Internationalis – the universal Catholic Church’s global federation of more than 160 humanitarian organizations – and from Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Catholic Church’s international relief organization, have warned that shutting down USAID funding will harm millions of people around the world.
Cardinal McElroy said eliminating funding for USAID programs providing crucial assistance for clinics, health care, vaccines and food services to the world’s poor is “utterly contrary to everything about this gospel (story) and about our life as disciples of Jesus Christ.”
The cardinal compared undocumented immigrants facing the government’s policy of mass deportations to the victim in the parable, as those undocumented men, women and children live in fear in a society where many have lived for decades.
“The undocumented are victims of this moment and of these policies, and we as a Church need to advocate continually for our solidarity with them, and for their dignity as human persons. We must not only advocate, but we must act in support of them in every way possible,” Cardinal McElroy.
The cardinal – who served as the bishop of San Diego from 2015 until being named by Pope Francis as the archbishop of Washington on Jan. 6, 2025 and being installed in that role on March 11 – estimated that undocumented immigrants constituted about 10 percent of the population in his previous diocese, which included the border area with Mexico. Now these people, whose lives he said are marked by faith, sacrifice and resilience, “live now in fear, and their lives are being upended in a purposeful way.”
The figure of the Good Samaritan, Cardinal McElroy said, provides the centerpiece of the parable. “The Good Samaritan is a foreigner, this is so crucial to the parable, a foreigner and a stranger in that society in which he is living, an outcast, and yet he comes by, and he sees the man lying by the side of the road and he stops, he overcomes the danger and the indifference, and he stops and lifts the man up, helps him on his donkey, and takes him and cares for him so that he might be well and rescued from his suffering,” the cardinal said. “This is the example of the figure that each of us is called to be, one who sacrifices and thinks of others in their hardship and in their suffering, and who is not bound by the chains of indifference and fear, to let that suffering go by, and merely walk along.”
While undocumented immigrants can be compared to the victim in the parable, Cardinal McElroy emphasized that “the primary character of the story who represents the undocumented is the Good Samaritan, and that’s what we have to give witness to. The Good Samaritan is a man of faith and sacrifice and compassion and care… The undocumented men, women and children and families in our midst are that, too… We cannot focus primarily on this notion that the undocumented are suffering and victims. We have to reclaim the notion in our culture and our society that they are the Good Samaritan. They sacrifice for their families. They work hard, and they build up our society. They bring good values to our nation. They bring a sense of solidarity, a strong sense of family, of what it means to give up, so that your child can have a better life.”
Cardinal McElroy noted how Pope Francis in his letter to the U.S. bishops emphasized that it is wrong to “to focus on those who are undocumented as criminals, as if that captures the reality of who they are. It does not. They are exactly the type of people that we wish to come to our nation, to help build it up, to make it more beautiful, to make it a place where so many of the values which are atrophying in our society with its secularism, to be replaced by faith and by a sense there is something greater than the individual here.”
If people in the United States understand the positive impact of these immigrants, Cardinal McElroy said, “we (can) reclaim our heritage as a nation, that we are a people that were built by immigrants of every generation, who came in that very same way, all of them desperate in so many ways, seeking a new life for themselves and their families.”
The cardinal added that “we must make that the centerpiece as a Church, how we respond to this. Yes, understanding the suffering and being in solidarity with our undocumented men, women, children and families as they are victimized. But more importantly, helping our society recognize these are the type of people we want among us, these are the type of people that our society needs if it is to come back to some of these cultural elements of the common good, of care for others, and of compassion, which really need to be at the heart of who we are as a people and who we profess to be.”
Cardinal McElroy said Americans must also grapple “with the dark side of our history, because while we have a legacy as a nation of immigrants, there has also been a legacy of exclusion of immigrants, of denigration of immigrants, of caricaturing of immigrants,” and he pointed out how when earlier generations of Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants settled here, they were also “considered inimical to a good American society.”
“Many themes that are supporting the effort to undermine the rights and human dignity of the undocumented come from the blackest parts of our history and the belief that our culture is being undermined. That is why we must point to the undocumented as the true Good Samaritans in all this… the vast majority are here for the same reason that people came to our country and built it up,” the cardinal said.
Washington’s archbishop said people must understand that, like the priest and Levite in the parable, indifference or fear toward undocumented immigrants exists within their hearts and within institutions.
“We have to struggle with this. We have to overcome the indifference. We have to face it for what it is,” Cardinal McElroy said. He added, “We have to get beyond it, and that’s my understanding of the core of what Jesus is talking about in the parable. (Jesus is saying) if you truly wish to be my follower, you must in your heart and in your soul have that love for the stranger which the Good Samaritan exhibited and take the risk which the Good Samaritan did for the stranger, if you are to be my disciple. Truly in this world at this moment, that is what we must do.”
Concluding his remarks, the cardinal said the United States has had a broken immigration system for a long time. “Both parties have been at fault for failing to reach an accord on immigration reform,” he said.
“And now we face two different pathways. The first pathway which Catholic Social Teaching would support, and does support, is to change our laws so that they have secure borders and dignity for the treatment of everyone at those borders, and a generous asylum and refugee policy. That is one pathway we as a nation can come toward, and I actually believe most Americans would be in favor of that pathway,” Cardinal McElroy said.
The cardinal warned that “the other pathway is a crusade which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and our history. The crusade denigrates the undocumented, it labels them as defective, it castigates and encapsulates them as criminals. It refuses to see the human being that is there and the good that they have already accomplished in the society in which they have been living for so many years.”
“These are the two choices we have,” Cardinal McElroy said. He added, “We as a nation will have to make one choice. The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ. We must work to make sure that does not happen in this nation in which we live and which we love and which we care for so much.”
After his talk, Jean Stokan and Scott Wright, a married couple who are Ambassadors for Peace for Pax Christi USA, presented a poster of St. Oscar Romero to the cardinal. The conference took place on the March 24 feast day of St. Oscar Romero, an archbishop in El Salvador and an outspoken advocate for the poor and for peace in his country who was assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980. He was canonized in 2018 by Pope Francis, who wore the belt worn by St. Romero when he was martyred.
Cardinal McElroy, who was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 1980 about three weeks after St. Romero’s death, said the portrait “is particularly meaningful to me… He’s always been a great figure for all of us, as a man of strength, courage and love, and he was truly a Good Samaritan and a good priest. Thank you very much.”
(An upcoming roundup story will include insights from other speakers at the conference on work with migrants and refugees.)
