Denver Newsroom, Jun 2, 2020 / 12:42 am (CNA).- Bishop Thomas Zinkula of Davenport, Iowa has written a letter to the local homeland security chief asking for the release of three detained immigrants from Guatemala.
The bishop says that the three men are non-violent offenders who pose little risk to the community.
“The present COVID-19 pandemic places immigrants being detained in a very vulnerable situation,” he says in the letter, addressed to Michael Hindman, Homeland Security Chief of Cedar Rapids.
Zinkula told CNA that he read about the situation of the three men and their families in the local press and in emails from the Iowa City Catholic Worker House.
Jose Cerillo and his two brothers-in-law, Jacinto Cuyuch-Brito and Juan Daniel Cuyuch-Brito, were arrested March 4 in a Cedar Rapids immigration raid, according to local media. They were charged with possessing false work documents or entering the country illegally.
Jose’s wife, Juana, spoke at a May 6 press conference in Cedar Rapids. She said that law enforcement officers knocked on the door of their apartment shortly before 7 a.m. on March 4. The officers broke down the door, and searched their clothes and phone contacts, she said, according to The Catholic Messenger.
Juana said she was questioned for more than two hours. At the May 6 press conference, said she was worried about her husband, who is being held in Linn County Jail, which has seen at least two confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
Jose has a serious heart condition, his wife said, making him more likely to experience serious or fatal complications from COVID-19.
“We're just here to work. We come here because we have to, out of need,” Juana said, according to the Des Moines Register. “If one of us gets it and we ended up dying, we won't get to see each other again.”
Jacinto Cuyuch-Brito’s wife, Rosa, is also struggling with her husband’s absence. She and her baby boy – who was just two months old at the time of the arrest – have moved into the local Catholic Worker House, because they cannot afford to pay rent with her husband detained.
Bishop Zinkula said he was struck by Rosa’s story and wanted to see if there was a way that he could help. While writing a letter is a simple action, he said he thought “maybe given my role, I could give it a little more attention.”
The letter argues in favor of allowing the men to return home to their families while the await their court proceedings.
“Providing less restrictive sanctions will reduce the risk of exposure to the coronavirus for these three nonviolent individuals, those who are in jail for legitimate public safety reasons, and jail staff continuing their frontline essential public safety work,” the bishop writes.
Zinkula said his proposal would help protect the vulnerable and honor family unity without compromising public safety.
“These are basic principles of [Catholic] Social Teaching – the dignity of each and every human life,” Zinkula told CNA. “We’re all children of God, and everyone should be treated with respect. This is just an application of that principle. Here’s this real-life situation, where it doesn’t seem like that’s happening.”
He noted a CDC analysis in April which found that among correctional and detention facilities reporting statistics, 86% of jurisdictions had inmates testing positive for coronavirus. Because social distancing is difficult in prison environments, jails throughout the country have become hotspots for the virus.
Zinkula has not received a response to his letter, which was sent May 7, but is still hopeful that the three men will be released from detention.
The bishop encouraged the faithful to “look at the situation through a Catholic lens rather than a political lens. Remember, we’re Catholic before we’re members of a particular party.”
“Immigrants are fellow human beings, brothers and sisters in Christ and they need to be treated with dignity and respect,” he said. “They are here, and no matter how they got here, they are fellow human beings and so we need to treat them like they are.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Washington D.C., Jun 1, 2017 / 03:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic leaders around the world expressed disappointment as President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the U.S. was pulling out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Washington D.C., Oct 3, 2018 / 02:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A recent poll has shown a drop in popularity for Pope Francis in the United States over the past year. The poll suggests that many Americans increasingly disapprove of how the pope has handled t… […]
An artist’s rendering of the affordable apartment complex soon to be built by Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance in Los Angeles. / Courtesy of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance
St. Louis, Mo., Aug 26, 2024 / 06:30 am (CNA).
Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, with an average home price almost touching a million dollars in 2024 — a landscape that crowds out not only the poor, but also young families with children. The high cost of housing is one of the primary reasons why tens of thousands of people live on the streets of LA, and most of those who are housed are “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income just keeping a roof over their heads.
In the face of such challenges, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently announced it will provide land for a new housing development dedicated to serving community college students and young people exiting the foster care system.
Amy Anderson, executive director of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance and a former chief of housing for the City of Los Angeles, told EWTN News that a group of Catholic lay leaders from the business and philanthropic community reached out to the archdiocese with a vision for creating an independent, nonprofit affordable housing development organization.
“Our vision is to really collaborate with the archdiocese and [use] the resources potentially available from the archdiocese to create homes that are affordable to a wide range of populations and incomes,” Anderson told “EWTN News Nightly” anchor Tracy Sabol.
She said they hope to break ground on the project, known as the Willowbrook development, “about a year from now.”
“The archdiocese is a fantastic partner. They are providing the land for our first development, which is already in process, and we’re working really closely with them to identify additional opportunities.”
The proposed building, which will be located steps from Los Angeles Community College, will feature 74 affordable housing units, as well as “on-site supportive services” for young people transitioning out of foster care — a population that often ends up experiencing homelessness.
The land, located at 4665 Willow Brook Ave just a few miles from the Hollywood Sign, currently hosts a Catholic Charities building, which will move its operations to another site to make way for the apartments.
“Through Catholic Charities and our ministries on Skid Row [an LA street where many unhoused people live] and elsewhere, we have been working for many years to provide shelter and services for our homeless brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Jose Gomez said in a statement to LAist.
“With this new initiative we see exciting possibilities to make more affordable housing available, especially for families and young people.”
Making land work for mission
The Catholic Church is often cited as the largest non-governmental owner of land in the entire world, with an estimated 177 million acres owned by Catholic entities.
Maddy Johnson, program manager for the Church Properties Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE), noted that the Church as a large landowner is not a new phenomenon, but there is a need today to adapt to modern challenges like regulations, zoning, and the importance of caring for the natural environment.
Many Catholic dioceses and religious orders have properties in their possession that aren’t fulfilling their original purpose, including disused natural land and parking lots, as well as shuttered convents and schools. Sometimes, Johnson said, a diocese or religious order doesn’t even realize the full extent of what they own.
“How can the Church make good strategic decisions, strategic and mission-aligned decisions, if it doesn’t know what properties it’s responsible for?” she said.
The Church of St. Agatha and St. James in Philadelphia, with The Chestnut in the foreground, a housing unit developed on property ground-leased from the church. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
Since real estate management is not the Church’s core competency, FIRE aims to “provide a space for peer learning” to educate and equip Church leaders to make better use of their properties in service of the Church’s mission.
To this end, they offer an undergraduate minor at Notre Dame that aims to teach students how to help the Church make strategic real estate decisions that align with the Church’s mission. The Institute also organizes a quarterly networking call with diocesan real estate directors, as well as an annual conference to allow Catholic leaders to convene, share best practices, and learn from each other.
Fr. Patrick Reidy, C.S.C., a professor at Notre Dame Law School and faculty co-director of the Church Properties Initiative, conducts a workshop for diocesan leaders on Notre Dame’s campus in summer 2023. Courtesy of David J. Murphy/Church Properties Initiative
In many cases, Catholic entities that have worked with FIRE have been able to repurpose properties in a way that not only provides income for the church, but also fills a need in the community.
Johnson said the Church is called to respond to the modern problems society faces — one of which is a lack of housing options, especially for the poor.
“Throughout its history, there have been so many different iterations of how the Church expresses its mission…through education, healthcare — those are the ones that we’ve gotten really used to,” Johnson said.
“In our day and age, could it be the need for affordable housing?…that’s a charitable human need in the area that’s not being met.”
Unlocking potential in California
Queen of Angels Housing’s first development, which has been in the works for several years, is being made possible now by a newly-passed state law in California that aims to make it easier for churches to repurpose their land into housing.
California’s SB 4, the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act, was signed into law in October 2023. It streamlines some of the trickiest parts of the process of turning church-owned land into housing — the parts most people don’t really think about. These can include permitting and zoning restrictions, which restrict the types of buildings that can be built in a given area and can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. SB 4 even includes a provision allowing for denser housing on church-owned property than the zoning ordinances would normally allow.
Yes in God’s Backyard
The law coming to fruition in California is part of a larger movement informally dubbed “Yes in God’s Backyard,” or YIGBY — a riff on the term “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY), a phenomenon whereby neighbors take issue with and oppose new developments.
Several Catholic real estate professionals with ties to California expressed excitement about the possibilities that SB 4 has created in the Golden State.
Steve Cameron, a Catholic real estate developer in Orange County, told CNA that he is currently working with the Diocese of Orange, which abuts the LA archdiocese, to inventory properties that could be repurposed for residential use.
He said their focus is on building apartment buildings and townhomes, primarily for rental rather than for sale, in an attempt to address the severe housing shortage and high costs in Southern California.
Unlike some dioceses, the Orange diocese has an electronic GIS (geographic information system) database showing all the properties it owns. Prepared by a civil engineering firm, the database includes details such as parcel numbers, acreage, title information, and demographic reports, which facilitate the planning and development process.
“Strategically, what we’re doing is we’re inventorying all of the property that the diocese and the parishes own, and trying to understand where there might be underutilized property that would make sense to develop some residential use,” Cameron said.
Cameron said he can’t yet share details about the housing projects they’re working on, but said they are looking to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Queen of Angels housing project as a model for how to take advantage of the new incentives created by SB 4.
“I think it’s great, and it’s exciting that they’re taking the lead and that they are able to find an opportunistic way to repurpose an underutilized property to meet the housing shortage in California,” he said.
“[We] look at them as a role model for what we’re trying to accomplish here in the Diocese of Orange.”
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago with One Chicago Square in the background, a residential tower constructed on the former cathedral parking lot, which was sold in 2019. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
John Meyer, a former president of the California-based Napa Institute who now works in real estate with J2 Development, emphasized the importance of viewing the Church’s vast real estate holdings as an asset rather than a liability.
Meyer said he is currently working with two Catholic entities on the East Coast on ground lease projects, one of which will fund the construction of a new Catholic Student Center at a university. He told CNA he often advises Catholic entities to lease the land they own rather than selling it, allowing the church to maintain ownership of the property while generating income.
Naturally, he noted, any real estate project the Church undertakes ought to align with the Church’s mission of spreading the Gospel, and not merely be a means of making money.
“Any time we look at the Church’s real estate decisions, it’s got to be intertwined with mission and values,” he said.
“We’re not just developing for the sake of developing. What we want to do is we want to create value for the Church, and we also want to create value for the community. So working closely with the municipality to make sure that needs are met, and to be a good neighbor, is important.”
He said Church leaders should strongly consider taking advantage of incentives in various states such as California for projects like affordable housing, which align with the Church’s mission and provide both social and financial benefits.
“Priests and bishops aren’t ordained to do these things, and sometimes they have people in their diocese that have these abilities, and sometimes they don’t,” Meyer said.
“This [new law] in California has created an incentive that we can take advantage of, so we need to take advantage of that incentive…it’s allowing us to unlock potential value in land while at the same time serving a social good that’s part of the mission of the Church.”
Leave a Reply