Testimony

On September 1, I concludedmy eight-year term as International Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, and Michael Schöpf SJ of the Central European Province of Jesuits took the helm. Michael, welcome and all good wishes! In early August, Pope Francis was in Portugal for World Youth Day and related activities. During a visit to a social center in a poor community in Lisbon, the Pope put aside his prepared text and spoke about love. He said,“there is no such thing as an abstract love; it doesn’t exist,” adding that real love “gets its hands dirty” in the concrete circumstances of people’s lives. I have been privileged to encounter such real love throughout the JRS world.

Before beginning as International Director, I spent early 2015 with JRS in Masisi, a remote town in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Dirty hands and feet were the rule in “temporary” camps that regularly turned to mud. I visited, I said mass in limited Swahili, I witnessed love shared between people displaced by violence and illegal mining and our staff members—many of whom had fled violence as well. As the acting bookkeeper, I learned what it meant to care for the resources needed to support our work. More than anything I remember the joy of those we serve and staff members alike: Christ was present.

My final visit as International Director took place in Syria: Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. I was privileged to spend three days in Aleppo after the devastating 6 February earthquake. There the dirt is from broken walls: concrete pulverized by war and tremors. Amid the ruins in central Aleppo, we serve poor communities with education, psycho-social accompaniment, and health care, helping them deal with distress and loss so that new life can emerge. There is nothing abstract about a war or an earthquake; JRS staff there, some displaced themselves by the quake, offer their hands in support of those in need.

Between DRC and Syria, I visited our work in 43 other countries, a blessing beyond imagining. I heard stories, visited classrooms and community centers, spoke with officials, took selfies. I was fortunate to meet those we serve, hearing their hopes and challenges, their requests, and their belief in JRS. I was grateful for and impressed by the accompaniment and service of our teams throughout the world…in complicated, dangerous situations, never shying away from dirty hands and open hearts.

We have had our share of “abstract love” these years. There are now over 108 million forcibly displaced people in the world, nearly double the 59.5 million at the end of 2015 when I began. The global north chooses to ignore this reality; what masquerades as a border issue is really a spiritual crisis, challenging us to ask ourselves ‘who is my neighbor’ each time a boat sinks in the Mediterranean. Covid’s overall death toll will never be known, but we do know that the invitation to a more just and inclusive world that it offered us got no response. From South Sudan to Myanmar, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, violence presents itself as a solution, but it only offers more suffering. Love in the abstract is a temptation that JRS counters by putting its motto into practice: accompany, serve, and advocate for and with real people, each of whom has a story to tell, a story worth telling.

There are many such stories I could add here, but I will hold myself to one. I visited JRS Romania in late 2022. It was a medium-sized operation a year previous, working with forcibly displaced people from around the world seeing refuge in Europe. In response to the Ukraine crisis, the budget tripled, the staff grew accordingly, and we became the largest refugee serving agency in Romania. For the school year we started afternoon classes for Ukrainian children, taught by professional Ukrainian teachers. The head teacher caught me in the hallway of our center there for a brief moment. “Thank you for welcoming us. Thank you for not treating us as refugees.” What she meant was simple: JRS welcomed her and others as our sisters and brothers, not as people to be excluded or pitied. She was part of our family, and she knew it.

In Rome I was blessed with support and affection by Fathers General Nicolás and Sosa. Their care for this mission made a huge difference in what we were able to accomplish. In the international office and in country and regional offices around the world, I was privileged to work with extraordinary colleagues deeply dedicated to our mission. Our hands didn’t get dirty too often, but their commitment to those we serve is real and life-changing. They have done the hard work of creating an infrastructure that supports our work in the field…a job never quite done and being done well.

Along with all of these were friends, benefactors, Jesuits from novices to provincials, other religious, partner agencies, church leaders, volunteers – the extended JRS family. Thanks to so many, JRS has become a global ministry of the Society of Jesus, active in 58 countries, serving 1.5 million people…kindling the hopes of our displaced sisters and brothers for a future of peace and possibility.

I am more than grateful for these extraordinary years, and to the whole JRS family for the love that makes what we do possible.

Thomas H. Smolich SJ (UWE)