Toronto archbishop leads by example, sponsors Iraqi refugee family
By Michael Swan
Catholic
News Service
TORONTO (CNS) -- For Toronto
Archbishop Thomas Collins, the fate of Iraqi Christians trapped in Syria,
Jordan and Lebanon is not just another tough case in an unfair world
full of too much heartbreak. For him, the situation is personal.
Collins has written to his
fellow bishops across Canada about the fate of Iraqi Christian refugees,
asking them to encourage refugee sponsorship in their dioceses. He has
urged pastors in Toronto to get their parishes involved in sponsoring
refugees.
He is also personally sponsoring
a refugee family.
"Helping refugees is
important in this world in which so many people are suffering, and I
want personally to assist in this," Collins told The Catholic Register,
a Canadian weekly, in an email.
Collins -- like any parish
sponsoring a refugee family -- will wait months before he gets to meet
the family picked out for him by the archdiocesan Office for Refugees.
However, wait times for Iraqis are among the shortest for privately
sponsored refugees.
As a Christian community,
the Catholic Church in Toronto should feel a special bond with Christian
refugees from Iraq, said the archbishop.
"We should always seek
to help any people who are suffering, and the people of our archdiocese
have always done so," Collins wrote. "But at this time, many
Christians are suffering because of their faith, and we need in a particular
way to reach out to them."
The archbishop created the
Office for Refugees not long after becoming archbishop of Toronto. Last
year he set a goal of doubling the number of refugees sponsored by parishes
and religious communities in the archdiocese.
The archbishop' example has
made it easier to persuade parishes to be involved, said the refugee
office's executive director, Martin Mark.
Given the number of Catholics
in Toronto who were refugees themselves or are descended from refugees,
it's not a tough sell, Mark said.
"In the Lithuanian Martyrs
Parish, which has nothing to do with Iraq, they understood years ago
that regardless of whether (the refugees) are Lithuanian, if they are
persecuted and we have the means to help, why not?" he said.
Mark spent all of July in
Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, interviewing refugee families and choosing
200 for future sponsorship through the Office for Refugees. He is also
in talks with Citizenship and Immigration Canada on ways of speeding
up the sponsorship process.
Copyright (c) 2010 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops
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