By Marlene Quaroni - Florida Catholic

Photography: MARLENE QUARONI | FC

MIAMI | Immigrants and their descendants, dressed in the native costumes of their homelands, filled St. Mary Cathedral on Epiphany Sunday, Jan. 4, for the annual archdiocesan Mass marking National Migration Week.  

Among those present was Joanna Cieslak, who wore a Polish folk costume and was seated next to Oby Okany, who was wearing Nigerian attire.

“This Mass unites us as Catholics,” said Cieslak, echoing the theme for the 2015 Migration Week celebration, “We are one family under God.”

Cieslak’s husband, Michael, came to the United States in 1985 as a student and settled in South Florida. “I didn’t see any future for myself in Poland which was still under Soviet control at the time,” he said.

Cieslak, a mechanical engineer, met Joanna on a return visit to Poland in 1997. They married in 1999 in Poland and returned to South Florida to start their family, which includes, Michael, Jr., 15, and Alexandra, 10.

Both children speak and write fluent Polish and have visited Poland. Although the kids are American, Alexandra said that when she is asked about her name, she explains her ethnicity this way: “I tell the kids in my school that I’m Polish and proud.”

Like the Cieslak family, Archbishop Thomas Wenski is a Polish descendant. During a reception after the Mass, the archbishop joined a group of Poles singing “Goralu Czy Ci Nie Zal,” about a Polish man named Goralu who is being advised “don’t forget your homeland” as he emigrates to the U.S.

The Filipinos, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Brazilians, Indians, Chinese, Haitians, Hungarians and others who took part in the Mass had stories similar to that of the Cieslaks.

The Archdiocese of Miami has established several churches where Mass is celebrated in the native tongues of some of its various ethnic apostolates. The Cieslak family attends Our Lady of Czestochowa Mission in Pompano Beach, where they can worship in Polish.

In keeping with the theme of the Mass, Annette Decius read from Ephesians in Creole and Lan Nguyen read from Isaiah in Vietnamese. Deacon Alex Lam, speaking Chinese, read the Gospel of Matthew about the visit of the Magi to a newborn Christ.

Korean, Haitian, Chinese and Filipino choirs sang in their languages. The archbishop asked those at Mass to pray the Our Father in their father’s tongue.

“Go out to all the world and proclaim the good news,” he said. “The Catholic, that is to say, universal Church speaks all the languages of mankind.”

The archbishop called Jesus Christ “the Migrant of Migrants,” who migrated from heaven and became one of us. He said the culture of acceptance and solidarity is the contribution that the Church wishes to make in this world of fragile peace and broken promises, a world in which the movement of peoples is a reality that touches everyone, often in very dramatic way.

“As Pope Francis said in his message for this year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees, the Church without frontiers, Mother to all, opens her arms to welcome all people, without distinction or limits, in order to proclaim that God is love,” Archbishop Wenski said.

The archbishop served as chair of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network from 1998 to 2001 and chair of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration from 2001 to 2004.

In his homily, he also renewed his and the bishops’ call for a just and comprehensive immigration reform.

“We continue to insist that the Congress act so that 11 million people living here in this country in an irregular status and those families waiting to be reunited with loved ones are not robbed of hope,” he said. 

Republican in the House of Representatives blocked an immigration bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013, that would have granted immigration status and a path to citizenship to most of the undocumented immigrants in the country.

Last November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order providing temporary status to some of those immigrants as long as they have children who are residents or citizens of the U.S. and do not have criminal records.