Migrant & Refugee Sunday - September 28, 2025
I’ve had a long involvement with migrants and refugees. This reaches back to 1979 when three Chilean brothers were trying to seek asylum in Australia. They were put on a plane back to Chile. Their flight from Sydney to Santiago, had a stop-over in Nadi. It was there that the brothers bolted from their plane and sought refuge in a Qantas transit lounge. When I received a call from one of our priests in Suva, I contacted a trade unionist friend of mine and we headed down to Nadi airport. My friend was able to get us into the transit lounge and there we sat with these three brothers for a couple of hours. It was a dramatic evening as we tried to seek refuge for them in Fiji. I remember the emotional moment when the officials from airline insisted that they could wait no longer and we asked for time to say a prayer before they were finally dragged back on to the plane.
Many years later, during my years teaching in Sydney, Australia, I became a member of the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre chaplaincy group. Over a period of six years (1998-2003), I would enter the Centre each Thursday to say mass for the migrants and refugees who ended up there. They came from all over the world. Some had been picked up by Immigration officials for overstaying their visas or work permits. Others had sought asylum when they arrived in Sydney airport and were immediately escorted to the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. From being a relatively small centre, Villawood grew to become a centre that had three sections – low, middle and high security. I came to encounter many people who ended being put on a plane back to their countries where they underwent torture and prolonged imprisonment.
More recently, since my appointment to New Zealand, I have come to know many migrants who attend daily eucharist at our chapel in Lower Hutt. Most of the people who have become members of our eucharistic community are recent migrants from Africa, India, Philippines and the Pacific. For many of them, there was one place where they felt secure or “at home” as they grappled with the often-times terrifying experience of adapting to a new country, even as legal migrants. That place was the local Catholic church or chapel.
Over the past few months I have been involved in helping to form an Archdiocesan Migrant Advisory Group. One of the principal aims of this group is to help local church or parish communities to become more welcoming towards migrants and refugees. This objective reminds me of the famous passage from (Mt 25:35) – “when I was a stranger you welcomed me”. According to this parable, Jesus is asked, “When did we see you a stranger …?” Jesus replied, “Whatsoever you did to the least of your sisters or brothers you did to me.”
To care, then, for migrants and refugees is to care for Jesus. More than that, it is to recognise Jesus in our midst. After all, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus began his life as a migrant in a foreign land when his parents escaped to Egypt and saved him from the slaughter of the innocents (Matt 2:13-15).
From ancient times, the church has been a sanctuary against unjust rulers. We are being called again to be a community that is a haven, a safe place, in a time when misogyny and misinformation are creating an atmosphere of fear for people who are seeking to escape from poverty and tryranny only to find that they have entered a hell far worse than the one they escaped from.
Please don’t forget the words of Jesus, “When I was a stranger, you welcomed me.”
Fr Tom Rouse, Regional Councillor of Oceania
