This session explores the idea of violence and nonviolence in relation to borders and global migration. Borders are spaces of death and life. Established identities are stretched, at times inciting conflict and at other times transformation. New identities emerge. The papers in this session will cross the issues of migration and Catholic Social Teaching, as well as indigenous peoples and ecclesial membership.
This paper explores the tendency of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) to analogously inform its reflections on immigration and border control through the lens of private property. Recent CST on immigration and border control has increasingly appealed to the ‘law of necessity’ (which traditionally justifies the appropriation of privately-held goods in times of extreme necessity) to promote a general right for migrants to enter new lands and pursue economic opportunities, even when this is not related to extreme necessity. This paper recalls CST’s predominant emphasis on the paradoxical role of stable private property in serving the common destination of goods. Hence, by analogy, it highlights how CST on private property can alternatively support stable and (forcibly) regulated borders in order to foster mutually-beneficial exchange and better address global poverty. Once facilitated by (still-needed) global governance structures, nation-states can appropriately use admission to their territory to better promote the universal common good.
This paper explores religious views of early Brethren on the American Indians forged as they journeyed westward, encountered indigenous peoples, and settled in the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California. Examined here are the challenges with which the Brethren contended concerning indigenous personhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries upon founding the Lordsburg or La Verne College (now called the University of La Verne). The paper focuses on artistic representations of Brethren identity, particularly depictions of the Gabrielinos, as portrayed in early historical pageants of the La Verne College between 1927 and 1933.