Chicago procession leader aims at ‘solidarity’ with detainees, criticizes commission bishops
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A Chicago priest who helped to organize an immigration-focused Eucharistic procession Saturday said the group aimed to call attention to injustices faced by detained immigrants, including a lack of pastoral care in federal detention centers.
But Fr. Larry Dowling also courted controversy Monday, when he accused several bishops of affiliation with “white Christian nationalism” — a charge that one bishop says is “disingenuous,” and another called “deeply irresponsible.”
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The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership told The Pillar on Monday that about 1,000 “Catholics and people of faith” attended a 1-mile walking Eucharistic procession from a parish church in Chicago’s suburbs to the nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, where organizers hoped to enter the facility and administer the Eucharist to detainees.
“The intent was basically to do a Eucharistic procession — with the monstrance and prayer and song and praying the rosary and all that — to the detention center: To pray, but also to go inside to distribute communion to those who are being held in detention,” explained Fr. Dowling, moderator of the Chicago-based Priests for Justice for Immigrants, and a member of the CSPL’s clergy caucus.
Dowling, who is retired in the Chicago archdiocese and helped to both organize and lead the procession, explained that local clergy had until recently been able to provide sacramental ministry at the ICE facility, which opened in 2006.
That sacramental ministry became impossible several months ago, “when all this stuff started to happen under the Trump administration,” Dowling said — referring to the ramp-up leading to Operation Midway Blitz, an ICE initiative that began in early September, and has aimed to arrest and process for deportation undocumented immigrants with criminal records in the Chicago area.
The effort has been the subject of repeated protests in the area including clashes between protesters and federal agents, along with litigation from the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago, and eventual White House deployment of National Guard troops aimed at quelling the protests.
ICE agents have been accused of illegal tactics amid the operation, and the Broadview facility has been criticized for allegedly indecent conditions, insufficient nutrition, and detentions without access to legal counsel, though the federal Department of Homeland Security has disputed those charges.
On Saturday, 15 people were arrested outside the Broadview facility, though they did not appear to be affiliated with the Eucharistic procession.
Dowling told The Pillar that the Eucharistic procession was not meant to be a protest, but instead aimed to express solidarity with detainees, many of whom are Catholic, he said.
Videos which have circulated online show priests, one carrying a monstrance, requesting access to the facility, and then for permission to approach a secured fence in order to distribute the Eucharist to ICE agents and to detainees. That request was denied by ICE officials, who communicated through the Illinois State Police officers accompanying the procession.
Still, Dowling said, the Eucharist was administered outside the facility to many of those participating in the procession, and to police officers who provided security during the procession.
The priest said the effort was not meant as a political stunt, but that organizers did hope to “raise awareness … and to exercise our right to minister to the people in detention.”
In other parts of the country, dioceses and religious ministers have reported inconsistent standards on access to ICE deten
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