This past Sunday, Notre Dame awarded its 2018 Laetare Medal to Sr. Norma Pimentel, M.J., a religious sister who lives on the U.S.-Mexican border and serves immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Sojourners magazine covers the issue well here and includes a video of her short acceptance address. Notre Dame awards the Laetare Medal every year to an American Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity” and has been awarding it every year since 1883.
The award — and Sister Pimentel’s emotional address — came shortly after President Donald Trump once again referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals,” a dehumanizing description that he has deployed many times since he announced his presidential candidacy. Some are criminals, no doubt, but they are still human and retain their inviolable dignity. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical on the dignity of life, Evangelium Vitae, in the context of calling into question the death penalty, “[n]ot even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.”
Friday, I published this piece taking issue with the decision by the major of my city to veto the zoning request of a pregnancy resources center that wished to locate next to the property of a prospective abortion clinic — also, I maintain, an instance of indifference to the humanity of the poor.
How much do we need, and how far we are, from a politics that upholds the dignity of everyone, no exceptions.