The sovereign state demands to know where you were born and whether you belong. The mother of God, in a small house in the Philippines, asks you nothing.
A replica of the House of the Virgin Mary now stands in Alfonso, Cavite, a few hours south of Manila. It has the same stones, the same dimensions, the same quiet as the original shrine in Ephesus. It was built in ten months by workers of different faiths — Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, and those of no religion at all. The priest who led the effort, Dennis Paez, says he wanted a place “where no questions are asked.” He is a psychologist by training, and he uses a phrase from his discipline to describe the door: unconditional positive regard. There is no therapy here, he adds. The therapist is our Mother.
You who run the checkpoints — the officers who demand documents, the legislators who write the laws that make documents matter more than mercy, the pastors who comfort yourselves with the thought that legality and righteousness are the same thing — listen to that priest. The mother of Jesus does not ask for papers. She does not ask whether you are deserving, or documented, or of the right faith. She does not ask whether you came through the door or the window. Her house is a field hospital in a world that has made a checkpoint of every cradle and every grave. The only credential she requires is that you are tired, and you have come there.
Picture the young woman standing in the parish office doorway, the forms still in her hands. The priest behind the desk has a question on his lips — What parish are you registered in? Did you bring ID? — and then he sees the plaster face of the mother on the wall behind her, which also has a word on its lips, which is nothing. The question dies there. The question is the sin. The mother never asked him to ask, and he knows it.
This is the Church the gospels describe, and every Catholic knows it. The early Christians were the ones who stayed in the city when plague emptied the streets, caring for the sick regardless of their gods or their purity. The bishops of Mexico and the United States, in their 2003 pastoral letter, called the migrant the crucified and risen Lord in our midst. Pope Francis, on the rocks of Lampedusa in 2013, stood on those rocks and cried out against the globalization of indifference. You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The commandment is among the most repeated in all of Scripture. We know what the house is supposed to be.
And yet too much of our institution runs on questions. Are you Catholic? Are you in good standing? Are you — God forgive us — legal? The checkpoint has crept into the sanctuary, and with it the quiet cruelty of the gatekeeper who tells himself he is serving order while the mother of God stands at the threshold and says nothing, because she never asked him to ask.
I have been the gatekeeper. I have sat in a parish office and wondered whether this person at the door was a real parishioner or somebody looking for a financial handout, and I have let that question delay the help I knew I should give. I have been the Levite on the road to Jericho, too busy with the temple’s business to stop for the wounded. My own formation was in the Catholicism that loved its liturgies and its certainties, and the distance between that piety and the house in Alfonso is the distance I am still walking.
Recently, Hindu and Muslim pilgrims flocked to a Catholic Marian shrine in eastern India, drawn by a mother who does not check ID. The pattern is older than our divisions. The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to an indigenous man, not to the Spanish bishop, and she spoke his language. Our Lady of Kibeho in Rwanda appeared to schoolgirls before the genocide, offering a path of reconciliation that the country could not then take. Wherever Mary shows up, she brings the people the powerful have forgotten, and she brings them on their own terms. She is the patroness of those who have no other sanctuary.
Her house in the Philippines does not replace Ephesus. It extends it. It brings the inaccessible within reach of the poor who could never afford a pilgrimage to Turkey. This, too, is the Church’s work — not just to welcome but to lower the cost of welcome, to make the holy available to those who have nothing but their bodies and their hope. That is what the builders of different faiths were doing when they laid the stones. Mary, said the priest, brought all her children together. No questions. No litmus test. Just a roof and a door that stays open.
The officers and the lawmakers will not be moved by a small house in Cavite. They have their orders, their jurisdictions, their political necessities. But I am speaking to you who sit in pews and make the sign of the cross and still believe the gospel has something to say about the person at the gate. You know what the house is supposed to look like. You know the mother does not ask for papers. The house is already built. The door is open. Go in.