Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 6:30pm
St. Anne-St. Augustin Church, 382 Beech Street, Manchester, NH 03103
All are welcome to a reception following with coffee and apple pie
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St. Anne-St. Augustin Roman Catholic Parish in partnership with the NH Council of Churches and Granite State Organizing Project’s Immigrant Solidarity Network will have a prayer service affirming the dignity of all refugees and immigrants, particularly those in our state whose lives have been and are impacted by current immigration policies and increased enforcement practices. The prayer service will feature music in Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic and English as well as special prayers for those who are suffering family separation.
“The plight of immigrants is not only fundamental to our humanity and our faith but also to our nation’s heritage,” declared Father Samuel Fuller, OFM Cap, administrator of St Anne-St Augustin parish. “The title of Holy Family, Migrant Family is taken from Pope Francis’s Share the Journey campaign and serves to highlight not only the current refugee crisis but also how the Holy Family’s story of escaping persecution and violence continues today. This is a defining moment not only for our city and our state but also for our nation. Our prayer service serves to hold up the gifts of our multicultural community and to affirm the dignity of all immigrants. Underlying all of our efforts is the core principle of solidarity as succinctly articulated by Pope John Paul II. “Solidarity helps us to see the ‘other’…not just as some kind of instrument, with a work capacity to be exploited…but as our ‘neighbor’”.
Since April of 2017, New Hampshire’s faith community has held prayerful vigil in front of the Manchester Headquarters of the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Norris Cotton Federal Building at 275 Chestnut Street every time an immigration has been ordered to “check in” to hear news of their status in this country. The faith leaders have been joined by U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan and many local elected officials, as well as immigrant community leaders as they provide assistance and pastoral counseling to families facing a deportation of loved-ones.