Immigrants - A Prayer of the Faithful

 Doctors and Nurses,
Field and Food Packing Plant Workers,
DACA Kids and Others

Nobody, but nobody does ceremony and ritual better than: 

• the U.S. Marines;

• the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment (known as “The Old Guard,” charged with guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burials at Arlington National Cemetery and the Army’s official ceremonial unit and escort to the president; it represents what is best in our military, which itself represents what is best in us as a nation, and includes the Continental Color Guard); and, 

• the Vatican. The 2020 Triduum liturgies – Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil and Easter morning Masses were awe-inspiring in their simplicity, prayerfulness and images as a single priest – Francis – presided.

Perhaps most moving in its simplicity and the dynamic relevance was the Good Friday Via Crucis (Way or Stations of the Cross). The fourteen meditations of the Via were prepared by the chaplaincy of a northern Italian prison and written by and reflected the struggles of prison staffers and prisoners, their victims and victims’ families, and the families – especially spouses and children – of prisoners. And the prayers that followed each reflection mirrored those same meditations. 

In the struggles against the Coronavirus, we would offer new meditations for your at-home Sunday liturgies and corresponding Prayers of the Faithful.

__________

In the meat packing and food processing industries, workers are subject to the risks and injuries that result from an incessant focus on speed for the sake of productivity and profit. Injured hourly workers and their families suffer a loss of wages and medical challenges, because they have little or no insurance. Despite the hurrahs for the American dream of anti-immigrant cheer leaders, immigrant laborers – documented and undocumented – put rib eyes and hamburgers, fried chicken and fresh fish on American tables with only the hope that their children will enjoy a better life. At the same time, the COVID-19 is running ramped through America’s meat packing plants in which they work should-to-shoulder and their families and communities.

For the safety of immigrants working to put food on American tables,
for their husbands and wives, their children and grandchildren, 
that they may be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,
We pray to the Lord.  
Lord, hear our prayer.

As every American capable of genuine empathy mourns the deaths of more than 80,000 pandemic victims – parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, disabled or cognitively challenged - in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers, we must pray in gratitude and respect for the immigrants laboring in those same facilities.

Overwhelmed by a national sense of grief for these, the most feeble of the feeble, it is easy to forget that – in 2017 - noncitizen immigrants accounted for nearly one-in-ten direct care workers serving America’s aging population, while naturalized citizens represented nearly one-in-seven. As America’s elderly population continues to increase, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences predicts that we – parents and children, the aging, aged and infirmed – will need an additional 3.5 million health care workers before the end of the present decade. Anti-immigrant forces fail to recognize that, on average, immigrant health care workers – although older - are better educated than their American-born counterparts, while working at lower professional levels because of lack of certification or licensure; they work nontraditional shifts that are often hard to fill, and bring linguistic and cultural diversity to address the needs of patients of a wide range of backgrounds. In the most grueling of circumstances, they serve our broken and sick in the hope that their own children will have better lives.

In thanksgiving for immigrant healthcare workers –
documented and undocumented –
who serve our elderly sick and our physically and emotionally challenged, 
that they and their children
may realize the hopes and dreams 
promised by the Gospel and our nation’s founding vision,
We pray to the Lord. 
Lord, Hear our prayer.

From Guatemala and El Salvador, but the majority of them from Mexico, they face deportation at any time, despite having been in the United States for decades and their children were born here. Their labor puts strawberries and lemons, avocados and all forms of lettuces, peaches and apples, artichokes and broccoli on the nation’s tables. 

The Department of Agriculture estimates that more than one million – about half of all the crop hands in the United States – are undocumented immigrants, and growers and labor contractors place the numbers closer to 75 percent. If it was plucked from a tree or pulled from the ground, if it was harvested and you eat it, they and their children helped provide it. They are vital to the economic survival of every state in which they shovel, pull, harvest and prune. They are illegal and essential – a tragic irony denied by those who shout “send ‘em back.” 

Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts,
which we receive from Thy bounty and 
through the back-breaking labor of these, 
our documented and undocumented brother and sisters, who toil 
in the fields and vineyards, orchards and farms 
of our nation.
For their wellbeing and in gratitude for their labor,
We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.

In the midst of the greatest health crisis to confront America in a century and despite the efforts of policy makers and just-plain-haters to deport them to countries they have never known, 202,500 doctors and nurses, medical students and teachers continue to put their lives on the line each day. They are “essential critical infrastructure workers,” denied citizenship or recognition of the fact that they are “all-American through and through.” 

Twenty-nine thousand – 29,000 – health care workers- physicians, nurses, lab techs and others fighting COVID-19 are DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients, and, at great personal risk, are diagnosing and treating the sick in California (8,600), Texas (4,300), New York (1,700) and almost every other state. The federal Department of Homeland Security has designated them as “essential” to the nation’s perilous health.

Across the country, 14,900 “DACA kids” are among the hundreds of thousands of teachers who provide some degree of physical and digital normalcy to students who can no longer attend school.

More than 142,000 DACA recipients work in food-related occupations or industries, including as food market cashiers, stockers, laborers and supervisors, and in restaurants and food service and delivery operations.

From childhood, they have known no other home but this. From grade school, they are the best friends and teammates of our sons and daughters. In adulthood they are the doctors and nurses and lab techs and cleaning persons caring for our grandparents and ourselves in the midst of a pandemic. Their loyalty and service to America is selfless and genuine. 

For those who deprecate, despise, dehumanize and denounce
the documented and undocumented immigrants who serve 
our nation and its people,
that, You, O Lord, might grace them with the humility to see 
these same immigrants as brothers and sisters, 
We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.

For the documented and undocumented immigrants 
who are our neighbors, fleeing terror, sexual assault, 
inhumane poverty, and violence,
that they may be seen and treated as the 
Children of our Loving God,
We pray to the Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer.