Throughout this year, retirees and senior citizens in their 60s, 70s, and 80s have teamed up with consecrated religious of many congregations to rally for the rights and dignity of immigrants. They have conducted rallies and prayer vigils outside ICE offices as well as the offices of elected congressional representatives. This is particularly so in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
Journalist Meir Rinde of Billy Penn at WHYY, the local news outlet for National Public Radio (NPR), recently did a feature on these social justice-minded senior individuals.
The activists included Jerry Zurek, PhD, a retired Cabrini University Communications Professor who co-leads a regional chapter of the NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice. Zurek said, “I believe we should welcome all people of good will. They enrich our country. I’m a former teacher, and I had so many students who were immigrants themselves, some of them undocumented. I want to do whatever I can to help them.”
Zurek, who is in his 80s, was one of many older people at [a recent] protest. He said he wanted to be there, despite the cold.
“I’m trying to do everything I can to support our immigrant community to make America better,” her said. “We just had twin granddaughters born, and we want to make the world OK for our grandchildren.”
Dr. Zurek was joined by alumni of Cabrini College/University who share his deep concern about the current treatment of immigrants.
To read the entire account, please click here
To learn about a prayer vigil for immigrants, please click here
What a week! St. Frances Cabrini Shrine in New York hosted seven Feast celebrations over four days.
recent days in the Chicago area, specifically, at the Broadview Processing Center, for the second time in three weeks, ICE agents barred a group of clergy, religious sisters, and lay people from entering the facility to offer Holy Communion to migrants being detained there.
~ a reflection by Jerry Zurek, PhD, former Chair, Communications Department, Cabrini University
least one Franciscan sister, gathered on October 9 to hear a range of legal experts, historians and journalists speak. Panelists painted a picture of migrants consumed by fear and a legal community seeking to defend them, but lacking the resources to do so.
What would you do if you were undocumented now? What would you do if you were a mother of two children, one of them one month old, and your husband is detained and sent to a detention center? You had been seeking asylum because of threats of violence in your home country and when you go to your immigration check-in and are told that your asylum petition has been denied and you have exactly one month to come back with tickets to return to the danger in your home country. Your husband is definitely being deported. Should you pay $10,000 to appeal? What should you do with your children who are US citizens?
National Shrine of St. Frances X. Cabrini and the Cabrini Retreat Center will host a webinar series on immigration featuring Cabrini Immigrant Services, Dobbs Ferry, NY and Cabrini Immigrant Services-NYC and their outreach to our immigrant sisters and brothers.
“Dreaming of a