| The foreigner has always had a distinguished place in the ministry of liberation.
In the liberationist prophet Isaiah, God calls for action that is right and just (Isaiah 56: 1), and specifies it by proclaiming God will bring the foreigner into the fold of God's holy mountain and house of prayer (6-7) . The Gospels tell the moving story of the Caananite woman, the foreigner who crosses Jesus’ path and petitions a healing for her daughter. Like the hierarchy of the Church today, Jesus initially shows just how hard of head and heart he could be. His mission, as he had understood it up to this point, was to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, not to foreigners. He said, "it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to dogs." Interestingly enough, it took a woman to break through his intractability. She responds, "Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters." Suddenly the shells fall from Jesus eyes, the barrier from his heart. Jesus knows from that time forward his mission could never be the same. He said in reply, "O woman, great is your faith!"
We are challenged to liberate the foreigner from their estrangement. In our hearts, they will be foreigners no more. In this gesture of welcome, perhaps more than anyone else, we also liberate ourselves.
We can look no further than to the foreigners in our own midst.
There may be the foreigner in our home, banished by the family to an isolation of belittlement and neglect. There may be foreigners in our children’s classrooms, who do not feel that they belong and often cruelly reminded of that fact.
And, in many respects, the woman is a foreigner in the Church. Particularly, its clerical and hierarchical structures, through this recent scandal of child sexual abuse by the clergy, have shown the Church to be arcanely paternalistic.
Generally, the woman is a foreigner to the intimate life of the priest. The woman is a foreigner to many areas of Church governance, liturgical presiding, sacramental administration.
We are called to welcome the foreigner. It is high time that the Church opens its arms in welcome to the woman, in every level of its life and ministry. In a gesture of all-inclusive welcome, we are liberating the woman from an estrangement that has lasted for centuries. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Church is liberating itself to establish a new future of openness and complimentariness
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