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Catholic News Herald

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120916 fr neelyCHARLOTTE — Jesuit Father Peter Neeley, assistant director of education for the Kino Border Initiative, located along the Arizona-Mexico border, visited St. Peter Church in Charlotte the weekend of Nov. 20.

Father Neeley, who preached at all the weekend Masses there, said the main reason for his visit was to “humanize the talk about immigration.”

The Kino Border Initiative is a binational humanitarian organization that works with migrants in Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico. Its mission is to promote U.S.-Mexico border immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person.

The heart of Father Neeley’s message was to raise awareness of the daily reality and struggle of so many displaced, deported and asylum-seeking people at the Mexican Border – a daily reality in Nogales.

“How can the people of the Diocese of Charlotte humanize this discussion on immigration? How can we restore dignity to the people that are in the process of deportation?” the visiting priest asked St. Peter’s parishioners.

Father Neeley explained part of the Kino Border Initiative’s mission is to “build bridges.”

“Building walls is not what Christians do. Christians build bridges,” he said.

In June, a small group from St. Peter Church traveled to Nogales to experience the reality that Father Neeley described. One of those pilgrims, Bob Macpherson, offered a small reception the evening of Nov. 18 to welcome Father Neeley to the parish. During the gathering, Father Neeley shared with a crowd of about 40 guests what a typical weekend at the Kino Border Initiative is like.

“When you come out of an experience down there, you are going to give me the name of somebody you met and their story,” Father Neeley explained, as this is essential to humanizing the discussion about immigration. “We ask for the dignifying treatment of the people they (the U.S. Border Patrol) arrest.”

“When a person is deported, that person is probably at the lowest point in their lives. So we ask the volunteers to just sit with them for 10 minutes, and just listen to their story,” Father Neeley said.

The priest offered that, because of its complexity, the immigration problem can only be solved by people, not by walls or money.

“It’s going to involve us working together. It’s going to involve us doing stuff little by little. Complicated, but what happens is when you lose the human dimension of it, it all becomes dollars and cents.”

For more information about the Kino Border Initiative and ways to get involved, go to www.kinoborderinitiative.org.

— Rico De Silva, Hispanic Communications Reporter