Prayer service for migrants is a place to ‘show compassion’, says Notre Dame sister

Maura Baker

Staff Writer

In celebration of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, and along with National Migration Week — Set. 22 through Sept. 28 — a prayer service will be held at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington, Sept. 26, 7 p.m.

For over 40 years, the Catholic Church has celebrated National Migration Week. Historically held around the time of the epiphany, using the example of the three wise men as migrants themselves, the date has been changed to September in recent years.

Every year, Notre Dame Sister Maria Francine Stacy participates in this celebration. A member of the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Committee, who has worked with migrants in the community and as a Spanish teacher at Notre Dame Academy, Sister Maria Francine was part of the committee putting together this prayer service. With it, she invites everyone to join in the celebration.

“The Church says when you welcome a stranger, you welcome me,” Sister Maria Francine said. “I want to invite people to pray for and open their hearts to the migrant.”

“It’s a place to show compassion and to learn to feel Jesus’s presence,” she said, “as we are honoring the immigrant, which is something that I think Jesus would do.”

Diversity will be a big part of the prayer service, as well — with readings and songs to be included in Spanish and English. “That sort of gives you the experience of a migrant,” Sister Maria Francine said, “We want to give glimpses of that experience.”

Sister Maria Francine also said that she was “moved” by the attendance of people at the two immigration and social teaching presentations earlier this year, seeing that the topic of immigration is “important to people.”

“I really like that we’re able to come together and work together and do something that I think people are responding to,” she said.