15 minute read
after the raid
Father Steve Pawelk stops to pray with a parishioner who lost a family member to deportation after an immigration raid in Bean Station, Tenn. The raid's aftermath is the subject of a Netflix documentary.
After the Raid Documentary on immigration enforcement shows Glenmary’s love of neighbor put into action.
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story by john stegeman
There’s no getting around it. Immigration is a difficult issue. Whether one believes in welcoming the stranger or prefers building walls, the lives of real people are at stake. While some of those people live near the Mexican border, many live in the heart of Mission Land, USA. In April of 2018 in Bean Station, Tenn., not far from Glenmary’s St. John Paul II mission, a major raid at a meat processing plant rounded up nearly 100 workers. The raid made national news and took breadwinners away from their families. It struck fear into the heart of a local community, where many of the residents had lived for years. With nowhere to turn, people gathered at the Glenmary mission. The raid, and the mission church’s role in caring for the community in the aftermath, is the focus of “After the Raid,” a Netflix Original documentary by director Rodrigo Reyes.
The documentary was released on Netflix Dec. 19 and is 25 minutes long. It covers the emotional fallout of the raid, and shows the church as a real center for community and healing.
Glenmary Father Steve Pawelk, then-pastor of St. John Paul II, is featured heavily in the film. He said
his parishioners have a plan in times of crisis: Gather at the church. As soon as he arrived on the day of the raid, a car pulled up with seven children, none of whom could legally drive, seeking shelter. They were uncertain whether their parents would be coming home. Other parishioners, fearing additional enforcement actions, hid in the woods until someone could pick them up. The situation was unique, but for Father Steve, it was about helping the people in his community.
“As a pastor you’re just ministering to people,” Father Steve said. “I never know who’s undocumented and who’s documented until there is a crisis and I don’t want to know. I just minister to people. …Politics should not define our Christian life. The Republican or Democratic platforms should not override the Bible. As a matter of fact, not even the U.S. Constitution should override the Bible. That should be our primary document of faith.” “After the Raid” generally avoids politics. It shows a young mother whose husband was taken raising her child alone. It shows a parishioner who took in a Hispanic family bonding over a grill out. What it shows is a community.
“I said [to the producers] if this was going to be political, I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Father Steve said. “But if they wanted to tell the story of the people as it was unfolding, then we will do so.” Reyes agreed. “What’s missing in the debate is people,” he said. “We’re missing that connection with real people. If I made it too political it was just going to be pigeonholed and half the country wouldn’t listen to the story. I wanted to give people the experience without guiding it. “You watch it and in 20 minutes you get way deeper than you would in 20 minutes on prime-time news,” Reyes added. “It becomes real.”
Glenmary President Father Dan Dorsey spoke highly of Father Steve and his mission’s role in caring for people during and after the raid.
“It’s like being in a triage unit,” he said. “You don’t ask if someone is black, white, green, or brown, you just tend to them. As missioners that’s what we’re called to do. The image I love to use is to ask people, if this were Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus in Egypt fleeing for their lives, what would be my response?”
After the raid, parishioners of St. John Paul II took in immigrants, some of whom were fellow parishioners, who needed a place to stay. The encounters fostered understanding and friendships.
GLENMARY CHALLENGE glenmary.org photo by rodrigo reyes
Kenneth Wandera (lower right) is a Glenmary seminarian, to be ordained a deacon this coming June. Brother David Henley (back row, right) stands next to Glenmary President Father Dan Dorsey, posing with the Erwin, Tenn., youth group at the National Catholic Youth Conference.
Hearts Burning for Christ Mission teens from Tennessee grow their faith at national assembly of young-adult Catholics
by kenneth wandera
Some things are hidden in plain sight. This Fall I had the thrill of attending the National Catholic Youth Conference. I was chaperone for a group of young people from Glenmary’s St. Michael the Archangel mission in Erwin, Tenn. Among 25,000 participants, their enthusiasm was contagious!
The Sunday after the conference was the Feast of Christ the King, which got me to thinking. In the Gospel that weekend we read about Jesus crucified. In that Gospel there is a deafening silence of God, wrapped in utter darkness amidst a lot of chatter at Golgotha, the “place of the skull.”
We hear, “He saved others, why can’t he save himself if he is the Messiah?” Instead of many realizing that he is the king, we are flatlined with the Roman soldiers: “If you are king of the Jews, save yourself!” It took the second criminal to see Jesus the king, hidden in plain sight. For me that gospel insight culminates an encounter with Christ at the conference. There I saw that young people are not losing their faith as many say. If they were, these 25,000 young people would not be gathered in a downtown Indianapolis football stadium. Bishop Pierre made that same point, speaking to the young people: “I look at all of you and I say to myself, they are wrong!” At one point, the youth held up their cellphones as flashlights, and the stadium became like a night sky, filled with stars. In that moment, these young people had set the world on fire. They had become the light of the world, that light that the Gospel of John tells us the night cannot overcome!
My heart was burning for Christ throughout this event. The joy on the faces of these young people gathered from across the nation and beyond! When a football stadium becomes a holy place of worship, the king is present. When young people reach out to strangers, God is there. With endless lines to the confessional, the young and indeed all of us realize, like the criminal on the cross next to Jesus’, that we belong to a kingdom (and a king) different from what this world offers.
Let us pray for the young people, with their immense gifts and potential, their vitality and hope. Let’s pray that no one, no trend, no distrust, no illness, will rob them of the gift and the treasure of their faith. Let them hold fast to the knowledge of their dignity as beloved children of God! In them, just like in the rest of the human race, and indeed the whole cosmos, there is Jesus, King of the Universe, now in plain sight, and with us always!
Journey Into Love
a l e n t e n r e f l e c t i o n
The journey of Lent into love must be lived over and over again; this is why we celebrate it yearly. The forces of darkness are powerful, and it is only letting the grace of the journey wash over us again and again that we come to see how we are set free by the love of Jesus. The love of Jesus received and lived is the goal of Lent.
Lent is not just about fasting and abstaining, though of course these are good practices. Lent is about the love Jesus shows for all people from the cross. Lent also calls us to reach out to those we don’t know who need our help. It is this kind of selfless love that changes hearts.
A Journey Begins I saw this during our Lenten observance at Glenmary’s St. Francis of Assisi mission in New Albany, Mississippi, where I was pastor. Our hearts were changed and our understanding of the importance of our journey became evident.
I received a letter from someone who was interested in becoming a Catholic. The writer was M.B. Mayfield, who turned out to be a gentle person of African-American descent. He was moved by the journey to love. He found a home and love in the midst of the people of St. Francis.
Love Is Expansive This sense of love moved us to gather with our brothers and sisters of other faiths, and we began to see change in our community. We had the first ever service between the African-American church, Zion Baptist, and the mostly white Catholic church in Union County. This is no small thing in Mississippi!
We continued working together, and were able to gather the Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and ourselves to share funds, volunteers and time to help the poor in the county. It was an ecumenical endeavor that helped others to live a bit better.
The journey of love calls us to recognize and set aside our prejudices and see that people who are different are also the same.
Love is expansive. It opens up understandings of the great mysteries we celebrate during Lent and Easter.
Let’s rededicate ourselves to love, our only hope, this Lent!
Father Wil Steinbacher's Mississippi mission church broke down barriers between Christian churches in the county by participating in interfaith services in the 1980s.
The red-dirt roads of Georgia are the ground where Brother Jason (left) and Pastor Darrell reach out together. (BOTTOM LEFT) Brother Jason knocks on an apartment door on his route picking up participants in the C-Hope program.
Acting Like the Apostles
A Catholic Brother and a Baptist preacher work together to change lives in rural Georgia.
story + photos by john feister
Glenmary Brother Jason Muhlenkamp is a man on a mission in Georgia’s southwest corner. Driving outside of Blakely, past pavement to the red-dirt roads, to a mobile home down a gravel drive, he leaves his van and knocks on a worn screen door. A weary-eyed woman eventually answers his knock and begs off coming into town today. Brother Jason quietly accepts her excuse and comes back to the van, then drives off to his next stop.
It’s the day for “Neighbor to Neighbor,” a twice-a-week program that Brother Jason, a social worker, has started with a local Baptist minister, Pastor Darrell Alexander (New Zion Baptist Church). As we drive off, Brother Jason explains that the woman who lives in the mobile home we just left has a drug problem, which seems to have returned.
“Pastor Darrell had this idea 10 years ago,” says Brother Jason, speaking not only of Neighbor to Neighbor, but also of a handful of other programs, all operating under the banner of C-Hope Ministries (“see hope”). The
pastor, a career U.S. Air Force officer, had recently retired and now lives in Blakely. He got interested in community service soon after he arrived, then eventually felt called to lead a Baptist congregation. On the service side, “He needed to collaborate with somebody, to build a proper support system,” says Brother Jason. He found a partner in Brother Jason and Glenmary.
The next stop on our ride is a housing project in town, where Brother Jason once again leaves the van and walks to a few apartments, and people head for the van. One is a former felon, on probation still; others just need a job and signed up for the small stipend that Neighbor to Neighbor offers to keep people coming. As the van fills we finally arrive at Blakely’s Neighborhood Service Center, where class soon will begin.
“The goal is to promote self-sufficiency,” Brother Jason says. Participants meet twice a week for a morning, working towards personal responsibility to better shape their future. “The goal of the program is for the participants to set goals,” says Brother Jason. The goals are in four areas: faith and family, finance and education, social, and physical health and well-being. “Maybe they have dreams, and sometimes these dreams get hidden because people are stuck in survival mode. We try to move them from surviving to thriving.”
Early County, after all, is a place where survival itself is an issue for many. It has a poverty rate of 28%, more than double the national average (13%).
Friendship in Ministry Brother Jason and Pastor Darrell first met at a local ministerial fellowship, explains Brother Jason, then worked together at a Thanksgiving meal. “That was the start of a good friendship,” Brother Jason says. They worked together on smaller charity projects, then, with Glenmary Father John Brown, organized a summer Bible school that remains a staple in the community. Along the way, they developed into a partnership of service. Both men are charismatic, each in his own way. C-Hope Ministries, home of Neighbor to Neighbor, pairs Brother Jason’s skill as a social worker with Pastor Darrell’s skill of organizing and maintaining programs.
Pastor Darrell likens it to a scene from Acts of the Apostles, chapter 3: “I view what Jason and I do is like Peter and John going into the Temple to pray. As they’re going in they met this lame man. The lame man is all of these people that we deal with, looking for somebody to lift them. I view Brother Jason and I as Peter and John. John was more
TOP and BOTTOM: Brother Jason teaches a small group of participants at C-Hope twice weekly. MIDDLE: Pastor Darrell Alexander brings his Air Force experience to help cultivate responsible habits for participants.
Pastor Darrell, his wife, Sondra, and Brother Jason are developing a gymnasium, donated by the community, to be used by C-Hope.
the Catholic, that laid-back type,” says Pastor Darrell. He laughs as he says that, since you might think Peter, the first pope, would be the Catholic!
He picks up a little preaching energy as he continues: “John was more well presented. He knew the script. Peter was that fiery guy, always getting in trouble, you know, going right out there. I viewed myself kind of like Peter with the more charismatic type of preaching. What I love is, they decided to put aside their differences. Now, they have reason to be different. Peter could say, ‘Listen, I am the rock. I oughta’ be...’ But John could say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m the beloved! I’m his best friend!’ But they decided to put aside those differences and go to church together. And on their way to church, they ran into a lame man. And that’s us, running into all of these folks around these parts.” That’s Brother Jason and Pastor Darrell on their way to Church, together.
‘Nothing but the Lord’ For the next few hours, here at the Center, Brother Jason will instruct the Neighbor to Neighbor participants, Lakisha, Crystal, Keisha, Kita, and Willie, leading them through a gentle discussion of how to set goals, and why they haven’t set goals in the past. Sometimes the issue has been domestic violence, rejection, addiction; in other cases it’s being overwhelmed by single parenthood and low-wage jobs. Brother Jason walks them through this curriculum of self-examination and life development that he brings from his social-work training. At some point, Pastor Darrell walks in, listens, and shares. His position as a local, African American Baptist minister carries of lot of influence with this group of participants. The preacher and the brother, one more vocal, one quiet, know that Pastor Darrell's dream of C-Hope Ministries has brought an opening for both of them to reach out in the community.
Pastor Darrell offers the example of a house fire: “We had two families whose homes burned. They lost everything. We were able to walk into that situation because of what Glenmary and others are contributing. ‘How are you doing, Pastor Darrell?’ the families say. My reply: ‘This is Brother Jason from C-Hope. We’re here to help you in this situation. I know it looks like you have no hope.’
“We were there to put them in temporary housing until Red Cross kicked in. We were able to clothe them until clothing came. We were able to give them food and shelter. That right there is nothing but the Lord, us being able to come together and be able to do that. And the community sees us working together.”
The next day, it’s early morning back at the Glenmary house, where Brothers Jason and Levis live. (Brother Levis nurses in neighboring Randolph County, where Glenmary Father Mike Kerin serves.) Brother Jason is the first one up, drinking a cup of coffee and taking care of emails before he heads off to the day’s activities. Then he’s out the door, heading for his car. “We’ve shared joys, struggles, challenges, and through that, we’ve built bridges,” he’ll say later about Pastor Darrell. Along the way, like St. Peter and St. John, they’ve helped a whole lot of people.
