“You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt.”
—Leviticus 19:34
The feast of Mother Frances Cabrini is a call to reflect on how our spiritual lives intersect with migration, especially in New York City, where the saint’s body rests in her shrine in Northern Manhattan.
In 1887, Frances Cabrini came to the U.S. from Italy. She began to establish charitable hospitals and schools. Today she is especially beloved by Italian-Americans. She is a patron saint of immigrants.
On her feast, I remember fondly when I used to live near Cabrini’s shrine in Washington Heights.
Mostly, Manhattan is a meticulous matrix—a rigid grid, inlaid with cubes. The streets are a rationalized plan, engineered to efficiently move merchandise across the island, from river to river. This system constrains all flaneurs within right angles. But at the northern tip of the city, the program is rudely interrupted—fractured by sharp, roaming cliffs of steely-blue schist.
Broadway bustles with pimped-out cars that blare Reggaetón. Lanky Orthodox boys in tzittzit and gym shorts shoot layups outside the shul. And the paths of Fort Tryon Park—lovely, dark, and deep—are like some allegory out of Dante. A 70-acre forest, the park is a debaucherous cornucopia. Hotly anachronistic, Fort Tryon bodies forth the medieval cult of the saints, and carries on the mid-twentieth-century ritual of gay cruising.
Across the street from the park is the Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. The chapel is post-Vatican II. In a Space Age style of clean lines and vacant surfaces, the chapel is not quite suited to the medievalism and mystery of Cabrini’s relics. Her mummy is in a glass box in the altar (but with a sculpted bust, since her head is housed in the Vatican). It reminds me of Spock’s torpedo-coffin in Star Trek II.
But sanctity often plays out in jarring juxtapositions, with grace appearing where we least expect it.
On Cabrini’s feast day, a surreal scene pours onto the streets, as devotees parades and sing through the neighborhood, carrying an effigy of the saint, decorated extravagantly with dollar bills. To Mother Cabrini, I have often prayed for my undocumented students, and for lovers with visa issues.
Near the shrine, the park is home to the Cloisters. This building—a castle on a wooded hill—is a series of medieval monasteries. These were pillaged from Europe by American robber-barons, shipped across the sea, and reassembled, brick-by-brick, in Northern Manhattan. The Cloisters are the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum, and home to all manner of manuscripts, artifacts, and relics. And certain paths of the park are still strewn with beer cans, blunt wrappers, poppers, lube, and used condoms. At night, under a broken street lamp, the darkness smolders with men and boys of all shapes and sizes and races and religions and classes and ages and serostatuses.
The lives of the saints awaken us to how our spiritual destiny is acted out in such landscapes of sacredness and profanity, pilgrims on a road to elsewhere.
But gentrification is a grave injustice that disrupts this landscape. Since 9/11, the Archdiocese of New York has closed down dozens of Catholic Churches. The city also has lost 16 community hospitals. Meanwhile, police and health authorities have destroyed a once thriving culture of gay public sex. And the campaign of state-sponsored terrorism known as “stop and frisk” has harassed hundreds of thousands of people of color annually, while the NYPD regularly murders black men with impunity. Around Cabrini’s shrine, the neighborhood is rapidly changing, as gentrification displaces long-term residents.
This process of gentrification offers a special challenge to the soul, morally and aesthetically. It habituates the body to a landscape that is sanitized of the sacred and the profane, where monuments to sin and salvation are replaced by vacuous consumerism.
In gentrified New York, the economy increasingly depends upon the ruthless exploitation of undocumented migrant labor. As Melissa Castillo Planas has explored in A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, gentrification draws workers into the city—but into jobs that are not protected by basic labor law. Undocumented workers are routinely abused, verbally and physically and economically.
Although the cynical exploitation of undocumented workers is against the law, yet the law itself is systematically racist. Federal labor protections have never applied to farm workers and to domestic workers (i.e., people of color). The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 legislated the minimum wage, the forty-hour work-week, and the right to unionize—but only for white people. Labor law thus formed the white-middle class through the racist exclusion of people of color from basic protections.
For all people of good will, this is a deep affront to the dignity of the human person. Papal encyclicals, along with the lives of saints like Cabrini, have enshrined respect for all workers at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine.
Yet even under brutal conditions, the human spirit is undaunted. Castillo’s research has celebrated how undocumented migrants, particularly from Mexico, have culturally flourished in New York City, creating new forms of art and spiritual expression.
In my own experience, I recall one glorious example of this innovation: Many times in Brooklyn, I have attended Mass at the parish of St. Joseph Patron. Against the established rules of the Liturgy, the services always included an Ave María, in deference to the community’s devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Of course, such additions to the Mass are doctrinally illegal.
But as the Virgin appears within the Mass—crossing orthodox borders, sin documentos—she reminds us that those who cross political and doctrinal boundaries are, actually, especially blessed by the Divinity. Nuestra Señora was a refugee of a genocidal empire, forced to flee Judea when King Herod ordered the extermination of babies.
What does Mother Cabrini want for us, in this context? Today, many white Americans—as descendants of immigrants—prefer to tell a version of history in which our ancestors suffered hardship and discrimination. Mother Cabrini, who built centers of refuge for impoverished European immigrants, serves a point of reference in this version of history.
But this version of history is a lie, a misrepresentation of the facts. White Catholics were never victims of systematic racism in the U.S. in any degree comparable to the abduction and enslavement of Africans or the genocidal extermination of indigenous peoples.
In fact, as the theologian Katie Walker Grimes explains in Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice, many Catholic immigrant communities in the U.S. were viciously anti-black. In New York, parishes often cruelly segregated. Italian and Irish parishioners terrorized black people and prevented them from moving in. Priests even refused to share the Eucharist with African-Americans.
Whites who claim to be victims of racism are perpetuating this supremacy. When Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants became assimilated to American whiteness, it was precisely because they chose to become white by discriminating against blacks. And after the Second World War, assimilated Irish- and Italian- Americans left New York for the suburbs. This period of “white flight” impoverished the city of its tax base; but also provoked the cultural renaissance of the 1960-1980s, when New York was filled with the radical counterculture of folk, punk, disco, hip-hip. Today, gentrification is the process by which the grandchildren of middle-class whites return to city, bringing a suburbanized mentality that is lethal to urban multiculturalism.
As Walker Grimes points out, the Church’s segregationist practices— because they involved the corporate body of the parish, the body of the Host, and the bodies of racialized people—have habituated the Body of the Church to the sin of anti-black supremacy. While we celebrate Cabrini, therefore, we must be careful not to fall into a kind of ethnocentric sentimentality that would turn her into an idol of a victimized whiteness.
Instead, Cabrini calls on us to remember the message of Christ, as a message of a particular kind of love that spontaneously prefers the poor, and rejects ethnic affiliation as a principle of ethics. Christ, as a radical Jew in the Roman Empire, pushed back against ethnocentric trends within both Jewish and Greek philosophy, which understood ethics as purely ethnic obligations not extended to others. Yet he pushed back, as well, against a Roman pagan pluralism that had tried to deny the importance of ethnic specificity. His parable of the Good Samaritan exemplifies how his practice was to not denying ethnic difference but embracing ethnic difference as an occasion for love.
In the Gospels, when the Lord is asked “Who is my neighbor?” he responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jew, he says, has been robbed and beaten by thieves and left for dead along the highway. Then, a fellow Jew passes by, but he ignores the man. Next, a second Jew also passes by. Finally, the Samaritan—who is like a modern Palestinian, an ethnic enemy of the Jew—stops to bandage his wounds. He takes the man to the inn, pays for his recovery.
“Who,” Christ asks “was a neighbor to the man who had been beaten?” In other words, Christ turns the question around. He does not answer, “Who is my neighbor?” (as though the neighbor were an Other, different from the self). Instead, he proposes that I become a neighbor when I listen to those who call for my love.
Although this parable is the core teaching of Catholicism, Christ—in his clever deconstruction of the terms of the lawyer’s question—is making a Midrashic maneuver, doing a kind of interpretation that is common to rabbis. His style of reading, along with his sense of love, are from the Jewish tradition, which had always privileged the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner (e.g. in Exodus and Leviticus, the commandment is to “love the alien as yourself” because “you were aliens in the land of Egypt”). . These deep wells of feeling for the downtrodden are common to all Abrahamic faiths and are key as well to Islam.
What the kernel of the parable reveals is that neighborly love is not a code of law, but is in defiance of law. It is an outpouring of desire for intimacy with strangers—a kind of cruising—that spills forth across boundaries of race and nation, that touches one another’s bodies in their vulnerability and woundedness. Geographically, neighborly love is performed on route, among travelers and migrants and pilgrims, folks the road.
Indeed, the English word “neighbor” is a terrible translation of the Greek and Hebrew concepts that are at play in Christ’s story. In the U.S., the word “neighbor” is suburban and sentimental: it typically means someone who lives next door in an all-white, gated, suburban housing tract. But clearly for Christ, love has not settled-down, does not reside in a fixed place, but is on the way to somewhere else—is a line of flight, an escape a seeking of refuge elsewhere. To love is to embrace the one who is alien but who is near, who is a closeby stranger. Curiously this means not eliminating people’s strangeness.
One of the things that white Americans seem unable to understand about love, is that it is not universal, but is preferential. Christ, in his own life, always played favorites. He preferred Peter more than the other Apostles (seemingly for no reason). He liked Martha, more than he liked Mary. Some of his followers are saints, but most of us are not. Above all, he prefers the dispossessed and downtrodden. This is a mystery and a scandal, and offensive to those of us with privilege and power.
Yet the Roman general—representative of all that Christ opposed—had the humility to tell the Lord, “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”
My prayer to Cabrini today, then, is that—as we push onward through a brutal terrain of racist capitalism, full of indignity and suffering—that we be filled with the grace that transforms our hearts of stone, into hearts of flesh, and hear the call of the alien.
A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., is the author of Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision (Fordham University Press) and Gender Trouble Couplets (punctum). Strouse is currently writing a book about the LBGTQ+ history of Mexico City’s subway system. www.awstrouse.com @putotitlan
Check out A.W. Strouse’s essay “Papal Encyclicals for Gentrifiers” from the zine. And check out the article Modern Mercy at the Cloisters and Cabrini Shrine in CWR.
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