by Frank Bolton
New Year’s Eve is over, and the season of innumerable solicitations by mail and email has come to an end. At a Mass once, the homilist said not to feel guilty about putting many of them in your recycling bin unopened.
More than 51 years ago, my wife and I purchased a house in Park Slope, a neighborhood that the major banks had red-lined: too risky to offer mortgages. That generally working-class neighborhood has morphed into one where homes are affordable only to upper-middle-class families. Despite living in a stable, safe neighborhood, I often think of those without that stability and safety.
Over 20 years ago, a Ukrainian student, whose family is from the Donbas region, lived with us briefly. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I sought him out (he was living in Moscow). After our conversation, I learned the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), with its U.S. headquarters based in Washington, D.C., was helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland, so I contributed.
Last September, my wife and I traveled to the Bronx Ale House for “Tap into Mission.” Michael Petro, an Arabic-speaking Brown graduate and a Jesuit scholastic who was spending his regency — a period lasting two to three years during the formation of a candidate to the Society of Jesus following initial admission — in Beirut, shared his experience of “accompanying refugees,” the goal of JRS. There were about 15 attendees, a few of them students from nearby Fordham.
In October, I began arranging for a similar presentation in Park Slope. Fortuitously, Father Dan Corrou, regional director of JRS for the Middle East and North Africa, would be back in the United States briefly over the Christmas holidays. He, too, lives in Beirut, Lebanon, which has the highest number of refugees per capita in the world.
I found space available at a local Methodist church, which gave me a discounted rental fee. Father Corrou spoke there on the evening of Jan.4.
Knowing I couldn’t summarize his talk, I asked Father Corrou to supply me with a brief reflection: “We are all called to be Pilgrim People. We live in the creative instability of always being on the move. As a Pilgrim People, we welcome the stranger as a gift — loving as we hope to be loved by the God who so loved us that he longed to be with us in our messiness. We are called to that same loving courage.
“God give us the strength to love.”
Pope Leo XIV calls refugees “missionaries of hope.” The epistle on Dec. 28 (Colossians 3:12) tells us we are to don compassion, kindness, and more.
Father Corrou does what St. Paul further suggests: “Clothe yourself with love.”
Amen.
Frank Bolton is a parishioner of St. Saviour Church in Park Slope.