In the English-speaking world, the church is increasingly a migrant reality. In the Australian context, the 2021 National Count of Attendance indicates that the proportion of those attending a non-English Mass has risen in proportion to overall Mass attendance. Though still a small proportion (13.5 per cent), it suggests that one in seven Catholics will come from a migrant background, with that number expected to rise.
Migration has long been treated as a political football by political pundits of all stripes. Given the growing migrant presence within the church, the question facing us is how we can apprehend this trend without resorting to the same secular political discourses.
In other words, how can Catholics understand the growing Catholic migrant presence theologically?
In representing Vianney College Seminary at a presentation at Campion College, I suggested that the theology of St Augustine, centred as it is on the theme of love and desire, can help Catholics understand what is a reality for many migrants—their yearning for a home, a yearning which has led them to the doors of the church.
When talking about migrant identity and Augustine, what is often brought up is the motif of the City of God sojourning as a pilgrim through the City of Man.
I think something even more foundational is taking place theologically, which is summed up by the famous Augustinian quote in the opening chapter of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Before we are thinkers, we are restless lovers.
Only that sin has done something to our love. This is summed up by the maxim coined by Origen and followed by Augustine, who said that the fruit of sin is multiplicity. The fruit of sin is the splintering of our loves and selves.
This is why Augustine, when speaking of his life of sin in Book II of the Confessions says, “I have been fruitlessly divided. I turned from unity in You, to be lost in multiplicity.”
The question is how our splintered loves apply to Catholic migrants. An ongoing challenge stems from the fact that a migrant’s country of origin is not the country of residence.
Because they are not born in the country of residence, the migrant’s allegiances remain a live question, particularly in times of societal stress. What complicates the challenge is that many migrants celebrate their previous belonging whilst in the country of residence, whether in food or language, or allegiances to the symbols or institutions of the country of origin, like flags, festivals, political and social organisations.
In response, assertions are often made that such splintered loves foment disunity within the country of residence. Seen in this Augustinian light, the criticism by political pundits of a migrant’s love for multiple polities can be seen as a civic attempt at critiquing the multiplicity of loves, for which the cure is a singular and exclusive love of the country of residence.
The temptation would be to apply a reductive rubric of multiplicity is bad, therefore unity is good, and try to expunge multiplicity as a prerequisite to unity.
Remember that Augustine confessed to being “fruitlessly divided,” indicating that Augustinian theology engages the problem of multiplicity not by expunging multiplicity but by transforming it, from fruitless multiplicity to a fruitful and redemptive multiplicity.
To this another, mediaeval Augustinian theologian, St Bonaventure, provides a hopeful inroad.
The crucial theme is Bonaventure’s take on Christ as the reconciling mediator between everything and its opposite. As the Divine Word of God, Christ is the divine reasoning underwriting every creature which is made through the Word (as we profess in the Nicene Creed), thereby making Christ the point of unity for all creatures.
Furthermore, Bonaventure highlights how Christ reconciles not just everything, but everything and its opposite, because Christ himself is everything and its opposite. This is because Christ is the mediator holding the Trinity together, bearing in himself attributes of Father and Spirit, which is why Christ fully reveals the Triune God to all who encounter him.
Moreover, Christ does not reduce or eliminate the particularities of either Father or Spirit to fit into a homogenised unity. For Bonaventure, unity in Christ presumes the integrity of both Father as Father and Spirit as Spirit.
If Christ holds together what seem like opposites by bearing the features of both, then a migrant’s seemingly fragmented loves and identities cohere with each other so long as they remain anchored in the love of Christ.
The closer one’s love gets to the Word of God, the more the one that loves becomes itself, and everything, the more they are ordered towards Christ and become truly themselves, the more they cohere with everything else, including their opposites.
In light of Augustinian theology, we should not be so quick to regard the Catholic migrant as a problem because of their multiple loves. If anything, their external characteristics and struggles bring to light struggles all Catholics face, our splintered sin-stained loves that only Christ can reconcile.
Unity then is not the function of pretending that multiplicity does not exist, but in finding rest in the person of Christ and his body, the church.
An expanded version of this piece will appear shortly in the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.
Dr Matthew Tan is Dean of Studies at Vianney College Seminary, the Wagga Wagga Campus of the Catholic Institute of Sydney. He blogs at Awkward Asian Theologian.