<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">The Loyola University New Orleans Honors Program is hosting Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J., the founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation and re-entry program in the United States, now in its 25th year.</span><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">His dedication to finding a place for all in our society brought him to the Boyle Heights community of East Los Angeles, where he served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, from 1986 through 1992. It was there that Boyle started what would become Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit organization that employs and trains more than 300 former gang-members every year in seven social enterprises.</span><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">Homeboy Industries also provides critical services to the 12,000 people who walk through the doors every year seeking a better life.</span><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">Boyle is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, &quot;Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion,&quot; a book students in the honors program are reading.</span></p>

<p><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/BORDERCRISIS.jpg" /></p>

<h5 style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 2px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); border-bottom-width: 1px !important; border-bottom-style: solid !important; border-bottom-color: rgb(153, 153, 153) !important; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif !important;">
Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami<br />
Chairman, Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development<br />
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops<br />
September 1, 2014</h5>
<p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 8px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">This year Pope Francis canonized Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II. Both made immense contributions to the social teaching of the Church on the dignity of labor and its importance to human flourishing. St. John Paul II called work &quot;probably the essential key to the whole social question&quot; (<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: arial; font-weight: inherit !important; color: inherit !important;">Laborem Exercens</em>, No. 3) and St. John XXIII stressed workers are &quot;entitled to a wage that is determined in accordance with the precepts of justice&quot; (<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: arial; font-weight: inherit !important; color: inherit !important;">Pacem in Terris</em>, No. 20).</p>
<p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 8px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Pope Francis added to this tradition that work &quot;is fundamental to the dignity of a person.... [It] &#39;anoints&#39; us with dignity, fills us with dignity, makes us similar to God... gives one the ability to maintain oneself, one&#39;s family, [and] to contribute to the growth of one&#39;s own nation.&quot; Work helps us realize our humanity and is necessary for human flourishing. Work is not a punishment for sin but rather a means by which we make a gift of ourselves to each other and our communities. We simply cannot advance the common good without decent work and a strong commitment to solidarity.</p>
<p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 8px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><a href="http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/labor-employment/labor-day-statement-2014.cfm">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<h5>
Dr. Alex Mikulich discusses hyper-incarceration and racism with Christopher Sylvain on <em>Health Issues Television</em>.</h5>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OlvA_JkqP8&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;list=UUz5KPRNWtDUQzOqr9mEwkYg"><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/cp am_0.JPG" /></a></p>

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<span>BY ALEX ALTMAN/NEW ORLEANS | TIME AUG 7, 2014</span></div>
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<p>Michael looks scared. He&rsquo;s been sitting in the corner of the auditorium for an hour, his shoulders hunched, eyes down, right arm occasionally hooking around his father&rsquo;s. Slender and good looking, he wears the uniform of a global 13-year-old: aqua polo, blue jeans, Nikes. When it&rsquo;s time to speak, he walks to the front of a room crammed with more than 100 Americans. On a hot August night, they have come to a Catholic school in New Orleans&rsquo; Mid-City district to learn about their new neighbors and hear a few give testimony.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m here because my uncle was threatened by the gangs,&rdquo; Michael begins, speaking through an interpreter. Then he stops and wipes his eyes as the tears start to flow.</p>
<p>Michael&rsquo;s journey to New Orleans began last August, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It is of one of the world&rsquo;s most violent cities, a place where 13-year-old boys are recruiting targets for the maras, the murderous thugs who control the streets, traffic drugs and collect &ldquo;war taxes&rdquo; from businesses and families. Visiting a relative after dark in the city&rsquo;s forbidding barrios often requires the use of ritualistic signals&mdash;a honk of the car&rsquo;s horn, or a flash of its headlights&mdash;lest you be confused for a turf-encroaching rival and shot.</p>
<p>Michael&rsquo;s parents fled this menacing scene nearly a decade ago, leaving him and his older sister in the care of an uncle while they sought greater economic opportunity. When bullets pierced the walls of his uncle&rsquo;s house last summer, Michael and his sister Yerlin, 17, set out for the U.S. in the back of a truck. Over the course of several grueling weeks, they evaded military checkpoints in Guatemala, floated into Mexico aboard a raft, then endured a clattering five-day bus ride north toward the U.S. border. They swam across the Rio Grande into South Texas and scampered up the riverbank, where they joined fellow unaccompanied children and a mother shepherding two kids. Together they trudged hours through the desert, until they came upon a U.S. Border Patrol agent. He drove them to a detention center.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Welcome to the icebox,&rdquo; the agent said.</p>
<p>From there, Michael and Yerlin&mdash;whose last name is being withheld because they are undocumented minors&mdash;were sent to a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in El Paso. There Michael came down with appendicitis, says Jolene Elberth of the Congress of Day Laborers, who works with the family as part of her role at the New Orleans Workers&rsquo; Center for Racial Justice. Michael&rsquo;s mother, an undocumented immigrant, couldn&rsquo;t get on a plane to join him for fear of being detained and deported. Once the surgery was done, Michael and Yerlin finally flew to New Orleans, arriving more than a month after leaving San Pedro Sula.</p>
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<img alt="Michael's Journey - Immigration in New Orleans" data-loaded="true" src="http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/widmer_immigration_lowres-39.jpg?w=760" /><figcaption class="image-caption"></figcaption></figure>
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<p>As harrowing as it sounds, their story is hardly unique. More than 57,000 children have crossed the southern border unaccompanied this year, the vast majority from the war-torn Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The situation at the southwest border has become, according to President Obama, a &ldquo;humanitarian crisis.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Like all crises, the public perception has been warped by the attendant politics. The news is awash in stories about local communities rising up to reject the children or the histrionics of elected officials posturing for some future job. These controversies are just a tiny piece of a complex picture. Unaccompanied children detained in the U.S. are cycled relatively quickly through the balky U.S. immigration system. From there they scatter into cities and towns throughout the country. In nearly all cases, they are reunited with family members already here as they await a court&rsquo;s determination of whether they can stay.</p>
<p>During the first six months of 2014, according to the Department of Health and Human Services&rsquo; Office of Refugee Resettlement, unaccompanied children have been placed in all 50 states, from the lone kid shipped to Montana to the more than 3,000 sent to Texas, California and Florida. They are everywhere, often thousands of miles from besieged border towns. Some kids will melt away into the shadows. But the majority will become at least temporary fixtures in their adopted hometowns&mdash;heading to school, playing sports, wending their way through the legal system as they seek asylum.</p>
<p>According to a government tally through July 7, so far 1,071 children have been relocated to Louisiana this year. The vast majority of them have come to New Orleans and its surrounding suburbs. This is the story of one of those families and the people who have welcomed them.</p>
<p><img alt="" class="size-special_medium_2x wp-image-3043780" data-loaded="true" height="35" src="https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/half10pxrule.png?w=760&amp;h=35" width="760" /></p>
<p><span><span>STRAINS AND STRESSES</span></span></p>
<p>Michael&rsquo;s parents, Ivan and Maria, arrived in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As Hondurans, the Crescent City was a natural destination. South Louisiana has had a strong Central American community since around the turn of the 20th century, dating back to this port city&rsquo;s role as a hub in the banana trade. The Honduran contingent swelled further after Hurricane Mitch battered Honduras in 1998, devastating some 70% of the nation&rsquo;s transportation infrastructure and a similar fraction of its agricultural economy.</p>
<p>&ldquo;After Katrina, they welcomed us to help reconstruct the city. They needed us,&rdquo; says Ivan. He found work as a mechanic; Maria got jobs cleaning houses. By the time the unaccompanied children began arriving in ever greater numbers, there were already perhaps 50,000 undocumented immigrants in the area, local advocates estimate.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We have this whole hidden Latino community,&rdquo; says Salvador Longoria, the president of the board of directors at Puentes New Orleans, a nonprofit that promotes civic engagement for Latinos. &ldquo;Everybody is ready to receive these children.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That includes a robust network of faith-based charities, who are working to educate churchgoers about the geopolitics driving the immigrant surge, helping their new neighbors acquire legal representation and easing their transition into the community. &ldquo;I think a lot of people are confused about the issues, and the legal processes involved and the principles at stake,&rdquo; says Susan Weishar, a migration specialist at Loyola University&rsquo;s Jesuit Social Research Institute, who organized a &ldquo;teach-in&rdquo; on the crisis for locals.</p>
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<p><a href="http://time.com/michaels-journey/">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>On August 5, 2014 the Jesuit Social Research Institute held the Catholic Teach-In on the Child Refugee Crisis and Its Causes. If you were unable to join us please take a look at some of the media coverage this event received.&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>TIME Magazine</em></p>
<p><a href="http://time.com/michaels-journey/">Michael&#39;s Journey</a></p>
<p><em>The Times-Picayune&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/08/catholics_hear_refugees_explai.html">Catholics hear refugees explain why they fled Central America&nbsp;</a></p>
<p><em>The Advocate&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><a href="http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/9925333-148/no-becomes-hub-for-honduran">N.O. a hub for Honduran children fleeing violence</a></p>

<p>by Liam Fitzgerald</p>
<p>I walk in and see the mural of water on the wall: the Great Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the Baptism of Jesus, and Hurricane Katrina. Waters of rebirth. I see dozens of people, mostly men, all around, greeting each other, greeting me, making appointments, taking care of business. Off to my left I hear names being called. A few names every few minutes. Everyone pauses to listen. &ldquo;Oscar B____.&rdquo; A sixty-year-old man in a baseball cap smiles and strolls off to take his turn. The buzz of conversation picks back up. It is sticky and hot&mdash;a typical New Orleans summer day. We are outside, but shaded. I do not really mind the heat; it is comforting in a way. Palm trees and vines grow in planters all around. It feels like an oasis from the asphalt of the city. A wooden deck connects six brown trailers.</p>
<p>This is the Rebuild Center. Oscar and the other men and women are homeless. At the Center they are called guests. Volunteers call their names from lists to take showers, get their laundry done, see a doctor, or make phone calls in the various trailers that surround a central courtyard. Why fresh air and plants? Calm is the focus of the Center&rsquo;s outdoor design. It is a new way of serving the homeless, and I am a part of it. <a href="https://t.e2ma.net/webview/v35cf/c9698a590768c2136c1aae7a51321338">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops (LCCB) acknowledges the humanitarian crisis surrounding unaccompanied refugee minors who have entered our country from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. We must address this reality with a spirit that honors the sanctity of the family and works to protect the vulnerable.</p>
<p>Our Catholic faith calls us to be compassionate to all as a concrete way of respecting the life and dignity of the human person. Such an approach is not conditioned upon one&rsquo;s immigration status or nationality. In fact, Jesus Himself was a refugee and therefore in seeing these refugee children today we are presented with a tangible opportunity to see the face of Christ. Catholic teaching affirms that it is in the face of the immigrant, the refugee, the asylum-seeker, and the trafficking victim that we see the face of Christ. Jesus definitely states, &ldquo;I was a stranger and you welcomed me,&rdquo; as a means to teach how we are to give of ourselves for the sake of the most vulnerable (Mt. 25:35). In a pertinent reflection on how we are to welcome children, Jesus proclaims: &ldquo;Whoever receives a child such as this in my name receives me.&rdquo; (Mt. 18:5).&nbsp;<a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/LCCB-Border kids-Statement on Unaccompanied Minors 8-4-14-mig.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>Vatican City, 15 July 2014 (VIS) &ndash; Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin spoke at yesterday&#39;s meeting between Mexico and the Holy See dedicated to &ldquo;international migration and development&rdquo;, attended also by the foreign ministers of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, on the theme of the responsibility of the parties involved in the phases of departure, transit and arrival of migrants. The following are extensive extracts from his address, given in Spanish.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The great contribution of Christianity to humanity, then, with the maturing of the times, will be recognised for the enlightenment that universal fraternity is a political category. Reason enlightened by faith joyfully shows that the human family are all children of the same Father. ... In a radical way, Christianity has stated from the very beginning that we are all free, we are all equal, we are all brothers. As a result, the dignity of the person derives not from their economic situation, political affiliation, level of education, immigration status or religious belief. Every human being, for the very fact of being a person, possesses a dignity that deserves to be treated with the utmost respect. <a href="http://www.news.va/en/news/cardinal-parolin-in-mexico-migration-and-respect-f">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<h2>
<span>By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.</span></h2>
<p>&quot;Meanwhile, racism, elegant, lovely, monstrous, carries on.&quot; So concludes&nbsp;<em>The Atlantic</em>&nbsp;essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates in his incisive analysis of overt racism by the rancher Cliven Bundy and the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, Donald Sterling.[1]</p>
<p>The deeper problem concerns what the heralded Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan describes as cultural bias. Lonergan asks: &quot;How, indeed, is the mind to become conscious of its own bias when that bias springs from a communal flight from understanding and is supported by the whole texture of civilization?&quot;&nbsp;<a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/The%20Monstrous%20Elegance%20of%20White%20Supremacy_0.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>