Scattered and Gathered

Catholics in Diaspora

Michael L. Budde, Budde

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532607103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This volume takes its title from the first-century Christian catechism called the Didache: "Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills... gathered together and became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth."For Christians today, these words remain relevant in an era of massive human movements (voluntary and coerced), hybrid identities, and wide-ranging cultural interactions.How do modern Christians live as both a "scattered" and "gathered" people?How do they live out the tension between ecclesial universality (catholicity) and particularity (distinctive ways of being church in a given culture and context)?Do Christians today constitute a "diaspora, " a people dispersed across borders and cultures that nonetheless maintains a sense of commonality and mission?Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora explores these questions through the work of fourteen scholars in different fields and from different corners of the world. Whether through reflections on Zimbabweans in Britain, Levantines in North America, or the remote island people of Chiloe now living in other parts of Chile, they guide readers along the winding road of insights and challenges facing many of today's Christians.

1

Religion Displaced and Replaced: What We Have to Learn from Diaspora Communities

Robert Schreiter, CPPS

Introduction: Religion and Diaspora Studies

The vast flow of migrating peoples that now encircles the planet has set off a whole new era in transnational and diaspora studies. What happens to people as they leave their home territories and settle in new places? How does this affect their views and their relationships to the places they call home? How do the circumstances under which they left—be they economic “push” and “pull” factors, the trauma of armed conflict or persecution, or now escaping environmental meltdown and catastrophes—shape their understandings of themselves, where they came from, and where they land after their journeys? And what of those places that become their new “homes,” so to speak? What are the historical horizons out of which a nation views its newcomers? How is a nation changed by those who arrive at their borders? In the midst of globalization’s flows of capital, goods, and ideas, where does the more problematic flow of peoples find its place?

These, and a host of other questions, fuel current discussions in migration, and the overarching fields of transnational and diaspora studies. Indeed, the paired fields of study—transnational and diaspora studies—are not entirely discrete areas of inquiry. They often address the same populations, and certainly address the same contexts, albeit viewed from different perspectives. It might be helpful here to provide a rough definition of each, especially in light of their relation to each other. Transnational studies follow the flow of human populations across national boundaries, and have indeed those boundaries of the nation-state always in the forefront of their concerns. How migrating populations see themselves, and are seen by others, is measured against conceptions of the nation-state. It should be recalled here that the Western notion of the nation-state, as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw itself as a collection of nations in the sense of distinct cultures. Indeed, the meaning of the Latin word natio is equivalent to what we now call “culture,” in the modern sense of that term.1 The nation-state was then a collection of “nations” that are bound together via contract in the abstract conception of the state, which was to be understood as a kind of ersatz nation or supra-culture embracing the various nations as though it were a nation itself. Peoples migrating into a nation-state, then, are perceived either as losing their own nation-affiliation and merging into the supra-culture of the nation-state, or resisting that amalgamation and maintaining some measure of cultural identity. Current discussions of multicultural policy in so-called multicultural nation-states are usually designed along those lines of relative allegiance to one or other “nation” within the “nation-state.” Thus, “assimilation,” “integration,” “autonomy,” and the like are all calibrated according to the metrics of the nation-state, which is seen as needing to be preserved at all costs. Not only is this framework at play in terms of immigration, but also in discussions and policy-formation regarding culturally autonomous regions within nation-states as different as Spain (the issues of Catalonia and the Basque Territory) and the Philippines (in the Bangsamoro Peace Agreement for Mindanao in that country).

Diaspora studies, on the other hand, look less to the relation of the new, arriving populations to the nation-state, and more to their formation of communities within the new country. Diaspora is not equivalent to dispersal. An immigrant population may enter a country, and may or may not congregate into distinct enclaves. Sometimes national policy is such as to discourage or even obfuscate such community formation. Such was the case, for example, with the first wave of settlement of Vietnamese refugees in the United States in 1975. They were deliberately located at dispersed locations so as to avoid the kind of concentration of people that occurred with the exodus from Cuba in the 1960s—with all the political consequences that such a concentration of Cuban exiles in Miami has created down to the present time. Diaspora, in the current understanding of the concept, means that immigrating populations form an enclave that sets up new networks of relationships both among the immigrants themselves, and with both the host country and with the homeland. These networks, both those that help constitute the diaspora community itself and those that define its relationships to other communities, are the horizons or frameworks by which the diaspora communities are understood and interacted with.

I wish to focus here upon diaspora communities rather than their transnational relationships. As already noted, diaspora and transnational relationships cannot be completely separated, yet concentrating on diaspora and diasporic relationships yield particular insights not only into the movement of peoples today, but also upon their impact on how we see more “settled” populations and—perhaps more importantly—how we view the whole.

In order to do this, I will begin with a closer investigation of some of the dynamics of diaspora communities as they are being discussed in the current literature. Then the focus will move to the role of religion within those dynamics. More specifically, the experience of Catholic faith within the diaspora will be examined further under the two experiences of “place” within the diaspora experience: of being “dis-placed” from one’s homeland, and of being “re-placed” in the setting of a new (diasporic) community within a new context. Some of the meanings of this, both for the diaspora communities themselves but also for the larger religious social configurations in which they find themselves, will be the object of our investigation. What I am trying to do then—although admittedly only in a bare outline—is to bring together some of what we are learning about the dynamics of religion in migrant communities as diaspora communities within the larger discussion about diaspora communities going on today.

The Dynamics of Diaspora

The term “diaspora” in its original Greek setting, meant “spread throughout.” It referred to peoples who were (usually) forcibly relocated to another place. It gained greater currency in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible to refer to the relocation of the Jews from the Northern and Southern Kingdoms into the Babylonian exile; later, the expulsion of the Jews from Judea in the first century CE came to be included as well. “Diaspora” has continued to have special reference to the Jewish experience of such dispersion, although it has come to denote the forced relocation of other peoples as well, most notably that of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade,2 and the imperial relocations of peoples such as populations from India throughout the British Empire. It can refer as well to dispersions that have come about through the pursuit of commerce, such as that of the Chinese diaspora communities throughout the world.

As a discrete field of inquiry, “diaspora studies” is relatively recent.3 It builds upon studies of specific communities (especially Jewish communities) but has broadened out in attempts to take a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon. As already noted, it distinguishes itself from the broader field of transnational studies in taking the diaspora community as its point of departure.

The literature being collected on diaspora studies is configured methodologically by a sense of dialectic, a back-and-forth between two foci. There are two distinctive sets of dialectics that come most into play. The first of these is “continuity-discontinuity,” referring to the temporal experience of populations in relation to their homeland. There is a strong sense of “then” (at home) and “now” (an experience of alienation). The second is “space and place,” a more spatially constructed experience about the location one inhabits in relation to the homeland.

“Continuity-discontinuity” captures especially the experience of rupture or alienation from one’s previous experience as one is propelled into a new, different, and sometimes hostile environment. Many of the features of one’s life that heretofore anchored one’s identity are swept away. In the new environment, others are not aware of one’s status or position in the previous society, one’s achievements, or one’s view of oneself. In the midst of the experience of profound disruption, which is part of the migrant experience (and even more so for the refugee), the past that is encountered is one served up by memory. That remembered past often takes on a more uniform, uninterrupted, and smooth patina than was likely the case in the unfolding of the actual events. The past—and the homeland—become romanticized as an almost unfallen state of nature compared to the travails of the present.

Indeed, the discontinuities of the present, where one is not recognized, where one might even be rendered invisible, can overwhelm and indeed drive this dialectic between present and past. The stress under which first-generation migrants and refugees live, even when they freely embrace their new setting, can be considerable. It is marked especially by this disjunction between present and past.

As one probes more below the surface of the tumultuous present and the serene past, one may find that the symmetry of continuity-discontinuity might be better expressed by what Daniel Barber has called a dialectic of “integrity-discontinuity.”4 In other words, the experience of the past is not so much one of an objective, disinterested flow of events, as it is a moral configuration that sheds a harsh light on the brokenness and alienation of the present. The past coheres in a moral, even aesthetic, unity that is contrasted with the disheveled, disordered experience of the present. It implies that any progress toward a more coherent experience of self and community in the present will be patterned upon, and be judged against, the remembered experience of the past. The emphasis here on the “remembered” experience of the past is of crucial importance, since the past was rarely as ordered as it may now be remembered. Nor is that past so stable that it continues to be replicated in what is now the present of that homeland. This latter dynamic is played out, often tragically, in the experience of first-generation migrants who are able to return to their homelands after an extended absence, only to discover how much their homeland has “changed” from the one that they carry in their memories.

The dialectic of continuity-discontinuity, then, is a powerful force in shaping the experience of diaspora communities. It provides a representation of the homeland in memory—that ever-changing relationship between the past and the present. It continues to shape the defining boundaries between the diaspora community and other communities in their new setting. And it shapes, both subtly and not-so-subtly, relations within the diaspora community itself. That diaspora communities are so often fissiparous and riven with disputes that to outsiders seem to be over trivial matters is indicative of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Religion Displaced and Replaced: What We Have to Learn from Diaspora Communities
• Chapter 2: Levantine Catholic Communities in the Diaspora at the Intersection of Many Identities and Worlds
• Chapter 3: A New Creation: The Catholic Faith in Diaspora
• Chapter 4: Harmony in Faith: Asian and Pacific Catholics in the United States
• Chapter 5: Passing Over: A Theological Vision of Migration
• Chapter 6: “One Does Not Live By Bread Alone . . .” (Matt 4:4): The Relational Turn of Theologies of Migration in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 7: The Love of Many Lands: Theology, Multiplicity, and Migrant Identity
• Chapter 8: Becoming a Multicultural Church in the Context of Neo-Nationalism: The New Challenges Facing Catholics in Japan
• Chapter 9: Diaspora as Mission?
Toward a Theological Interpretation of the Experience of the Cuban Catholic Community in South Florida
• Chapter 10: Diasporic Devotions
• Chapter 11: Negotiations In-Between: Indian Catholics in Diaspora
• Chapter 12: Vietnamese Catholics and Diaspora: Re-imaging Mary as Vietnamese
• Chapter 13: From America, with Hate: Bond and the “Black Shirley Temple”
• Chapter 14: Rootedness and Openness: Experiences, Practices, and Theologies of Zimbabwean Catholics in Britain
• Bibliography