Gimme sanctuary; the right of asylum.

It's a fine, sunny day, after a not too hectic week, and so, basking in an incipient ebullience, you receive with equanimity your wife's suggestion that you accompany her to Mass tomorrow morning. She promises "something interesting" will happen; you're sure to be surprised.

The mood of ebullience starts to attenuate perceptibly. You are well aware of what "something interesting" usually means: They're added a ukulele to the folk Mass again. But no, your wife persists, the surprise concerns a new mission of the Church, like the old days when visiting missionary priests would regale the parish with stories of roughing it pro Deo et ecclesia in some unpronounceable corner of the Lord's vineyard. That doesn't sound half bad, you muse inwardly. You cast your mental gaze once again over that wonderful Sunday when 60 Minutes--60 Minutes, for god's sake--pinned the tail on the clerical donkeys running the World Council of Churches. Nothing so fine has happened in your church, but John Paul still seems to have things under control. So why not go? She's already got you contributing on a regular basis again anyway. You say you will.

Seated in your pew the next day, you ponder the changes of the last two decades. As you're wondering if the pendulum may not be swinging back again, the Mass begins.

But it doesn't get very far. The Epistle concluded, sounds resembling those made by some ancient agricultural implement clanking to a stop fill the rear of the church. Father Tom bounds from behind the lectern and races for the doors.

"The bus is here!" he yells delightedly.

"What bus?" you ask your wife.

"That's the surprise," she says, beaming and turning hurriedly around. "The refugees are here . . . the people from El Salvador."

"Oh, God," you murmur, feeling queasy as the noise of loud, effusive greetings draws near.

The rear doors burst open, and Father tom leads eight or ten emaciated but determined-looking adults up to the altar.

Two tired, smiling women are carrying silent children.

"Amigos," commences Father Tom, "friends. Today begins a new day for our parish. We are about to become a sanctuary for these brothers and sisters from the terror and violence our country is supporting and creating in El Salvador. They have come to share their lives with us. They will teach us many things if we will be patient and willing to learn from them. I know you're glad they're here. Becky, play allelu. Let's all sing allelu for our amigos from El Salvador."

The thin, insipid tune strings out over the church. Some of the worshippers gaze raptly at the crowd around the altar; some are merely indifferent. Oh, no, you groan audibly. It's starting again. It's starting again.

YES, IT IS starting again. The Church and the churches, having with difficulty survived the decimations of the Seventies provoked by the shenanigans of liberal clerics, are embarking on a new folly--the sanctuary movement. Throughout many Western states, and with connections in the East as well, a veritable hostelry for expatriate Salvadorans and other illegal Central American entrants to our country is operating right under the noses of U.S. immigration officers. Chains of sympathetic parishes, congregations, and synagogues are offering their facilities for this latest manifestation of religious Left-think. As the effects of Communist religious repression become unmistakably clear in Nicaragua and Poland, to name only the most prominent examples, liberal American clergy and their followers are preparing for a new round of ritual social suicide.

And they are having some initial success in the courts. In January, a federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas, acquitted Jack Elder, the director of Casa Oscar Romero in San Benito, Texas, and a prominent activist in the Catholic sanctuary movement, of violating the immigration laws by transporting illegal Salvadoran aliens along the underground railroad in the United States. Although the acquittal resulted more from the skillful application of statutory ambiguity by his attorney than from public approval and support, Elder's victory was widely hailed by the liberal academic and media supporters of the sanctuary movement as a vindication of its political and theological positions.

But Texas justice was not to be put off quite so easily. A second indictment followed, for conspiracy to violate the immigration laws. This time Elder was convicted, and he faced a possible thirty year's imprisonment and $28,000 fine. Riding to the rescue, U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela offered Elder two years' probation if he would merely promise to cease violating U.S. law. Elder responded that conscience forbade him to abstain from this particular crime. Fine, said Judge Vela. How about 150 days in a half-way house, no strings attached? Accepted, Elder charitably agreed.

While it would be ungracious to impugn Elder's victories, we should nevertheless try to pin down just what exactly his movement claims to be, and what it is in fact doing. When the veil of holy secrecy is lifted from the sanctuary movement, we will meet an old acquaintance from the Sixties and Seventies, alive and well and recuperating in the Sunbelt. Liberal guilt's done got religion.

THE CURRENT sanctuary movement aligns itself in carefree historical abandon with the sanctuary theologies of the High Middle Ages. Rhetoric about the recapturing of an essential and natural component of the Church's ministry abounds. But when these claims are studied closely, there are many more discontinuities with the theory of religious sanctuary in the Middle Ages than similarities. Simply grabbing onto an altar is not enough.

Apparently, the first recognition of the sanctuary principle, or the right of asylum, in Christinaity was regularized in about A.D. 399, with further adjustments and refinements in 419 and 431. The gentlemen responsible for this codification were Honorious in the West, and Theodosius in the EAst. Justinian placed the final touches on the classical doctrines in about 535.

In its final classical form, this teaching was a limited cotrine, not a wide-open invitation to shelter any and all comers. Justinian specifically refused the right to murderers, adulterers, and kidnappers of women. The medieval doctrine in the West also kept within fairly strict boundaries. Innocent III refused the right to highway-men and persons who pillaged agricultural fields by night. The Scottish rule even required that the refugee, if accused of a homicide, come out of the sanctuary and submit to a trial on the issue of whether he had acted with intent, or with sufficient mitigation to make his crime the medieval equivalent of voluntary manslaghter. If homicidal intent could not be shown, only then was the sanctuary seeker allowed to return to the church. Any assertion of a boundless right of sanctuary, putting the refugee completely beyond the reach of the secular authorities, would have sounded very strange to medieval churchmen. The right was subject to close policy supervision by secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

Furthermore, the right existed for limited purposes, and within a limited time frame. It also entailed the ultimate loss of property, and the very real possibility of outlawry if the prescribed forms were not followed. Canon law stipulated that sanctuary existed for the purpose of preventing bloodshed while the terms of compensation were being worked out between the perpetrator and the victim of his crime. No open-ended period of time that resulted in defiance of the secular authority was tolerated. When the deliberations were over, the refugee was out. Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex.

In no case did the right extend beyond forty days. Within that time, the refugee had the option of settling with his victims or those with whom he was in disagreement, or "abjuring the realm" (accepting exile) and fleeing the land on the first boat out. The abjuring refugee made his departure dressed in the garb of a pilgrim, and was held to an oath never to return. He could not stray from the prescribed route, not by so much as a hundred yards, nor could he stop two nights together at any place along the way. In English law, since the refugee had no further need for his property, his lands escheated to the Crown and his chattels were forfeited. Should he be so unwise as to return to contest this arrangement, he was outlawed at once. You may be thinking, Yes, but waht of that clever fellow, the ancestor of many a modern bureaucrat, who, on the advice of a bright but inexperienced lawyer, decided to do neitheir, refusing to settle or to abjure? For this there was a splendid answer. The local authorities laid siege to him up there behind the jhigh altar, preventing anyone from bringing him rations, and starved him out. Finis idoneus. This not unattractive system lasted for criminal matters unitl 1623, when James I put an end to it. Civil sanctuary lingered on for yet another century, until 1723, when the first George had had enough.

This rational and strictly limited system bears little resemblance to the romantic blatherings of the modern Central American sanctuarists. The sanctuary movement claims the right of asylum for any and all Salvadorans provided only that they pass the capacious standard of opposition to the Duarte government. Recognizing no exceptions, they admit no limitations. This is not the law of sanctuary. Furthermore, the modern sanctuarists proclaim a right to asylum of unlimited duration and for unlimited purposes. Both of these claims were not within the doctrine as accepted by the sensible churchmen of the Middle Ages. They would have immediately recognized such assertions as the pernicious disturbers of the civil peace that they are today. But the modern sanctuarists go even further, and state that a permissible, nay, a chielf purpose of the right of asylum is the creation of a platform from which to disseminate the refugee's views. Consider the words of Eric Jorstad, in Christianity & Crisis, October 31, 1983:

One of the most important aspects of public sanctuary for Central American refugees is its goal of empowering the refugees in their struggle for peace with justice in their native country. Sanctuary offers not only protection, but also a platform. While underground, the refugees cannot be but passive before the events in our country and their own. But as they share their story, a bond of solidarity is forged with their host congregation, and indeed with all who would hear and enter into a relationship. [Emphasis added.]

The only platform created for the medieval asylum seeker was the one upon which he would be hanged if the tarried on the journey to the sea and exile.

But perhaps the most curious, yet most typical, feature of the modern sanctuarists' position is that is necessarily entangles the state and the ecclesiastical authority. Simply put, the modern doctrine of ecclesiastical sanctuary requires and rests upon a conception of society in which the "secular power" takes its marching orders from the "spiritual power," with no ifs, ands, or buts. There is no "wall of separation" between church and state here, but rather a flying buttress of church superiority. The manifest impossibility of meshing this doctrine with American political theory is demonstrated by filtering the sanctuarists' position through the Supreme Court's test for religious establishment as announced in Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971. The Courth said there that a statute or policy dealing with religion would pass constitutional muster if it 1) had a secular purpose; 2) neither advanced nor inhibeted religious pratice of faith; and 3) did not foster an excessive entanglement of the state religion.

One need only list those three criteria to realize that the sanctuarists' claims for their rights under the First Amendment violate every element of the Lemon test. There is no liability, of course, because the sanctuarists are not state actors under the Constitution. Still, it's instructive to reflect that the same people who turn apoplectic when the Revered Jerry Falwell suggests that the American people have the right to pray in their schools and to prevent abortion on demand are not really against church penetration of the state; they just want to be the ones doing the penetrating.

THE PSYCHIC ROOTS of the practice of sanctuary are sunk deep around the earliest expressions of human social relationships. No ancient culture worthy of that name has been identified that did not have this remarkable institution. In the ancient Middle East the Syrians and Phoenicians provided sanctuary towns and temples. The Hebrews also recognized the practice. Before the cult of Yahweh was centralized in Jerusalem, local altars offered individual sanctuary to all refugees. Eventually ancient Hebrew practice limited the right of asylum to six sanctuary towns, where only involuntary homicides could be sheltered. The Greeks also had their sanctuaries among the sacred groves and temples of the gods. In Roman times, the practice was accelerated by the institution of the imperial cult, and passed naturally thereafter into Christianity.

But noting the widespread occurrence of the phenomenon does not go very far toward explaining its ultimate rationale. Two questions arise here, viz., Why flee to the gods? and, Why do the gods grant sanctuary rather than turning the malefactors over to the first passing gendarme? The first question is answered by observing that holy things and places, by the common agreement of manking, have the peculiar ability to transmit in some degree their numinosity to those near them. The mysterium is at once tremendum (dreadful, frightening, repulsive) and fascinans (enticing, alluring, attractive). Thus, to reach the god or his sacred precincts is to share in this quality of the Other, and to become, at least for the moment, set apart, different, untouchable.

A subsidiary aspect of this relationship is that once having reached the place of asylum, the refugee begins to partake of the etiquette and decorum that surround the commerce of the human with the divine. In ancient cultures a great breach of social requirements occurred when one violated the bonds of the guest-host relationship. The host provided, in a manner of speaking, sanctuary for his guest, and no man might disturb the aura of inviolability that surrounded the guest. Clearly the refugee was in some similar fashion the guest of the divine host, and let no mortal dare to soil the purity of the divine hospitality by laying hands on the refugee. This invited the wrath and punishment of laesa divinitas.

So getting to a god was a good thing if you could swing it. But why did the god take you in? In so far as the ancient world also recognized the divine order as in some sense vouching for the moral order of this world, why wasn't the deity more offended than pleased by the refugee's presence? The refugee was after all a criminal whose presumptive dangerousness to his fellows was the cause of his banishment. The deity accepts the morally questionable asylum seeker for an interesting reason. The god is pleased to receive the refugee for precisely the same reason that the human host was not offended or repulsed by his importunate and unexpected guest. The guest brought with him a threat. The guest brought with him a threat. The curses of the refused suppliant were genuinely feared. Better to receive the grimy embrace of the ne'er-do-well or miscreant than to risk the threat to home, hearth, or altar that spurned pleas for protection would well merit. As Aeschylus has Apollo say of the suppliant Orestes in The Eumenides, "Terrible among both men and gods is the wrath of a refugee, when one abandons him with intent."

Well, what does that have to do with the present-day sanctuary movement within the American religious community? Plenty. Listen to Eric Jorstad again on the failings of the liberal churches: The North American church has historically been more active in speaking than in listening to the rest of the world, especially the Third World. This ecclesiastical and cultural imperialism [!] is clearly expressed in the following hymn to the tune of the "missionary hymn": From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand, From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain. Can we whose souls are lighted With wisdom from on high, Can we to men benighted The lamp of life deny?

Quite horrible. Simply shocking. But that's not the limit of our nastiness: The North American church must face a difficult question: Is our country helping pound the nails into the suffering body of El Salvador? [Never mind the suffering bodies of Nicaragua, Poland, Russia, China, Afghanistan ...] The sanctuary movement gives our church a chance to hear this question, as if spoken right from the Cross. . . . To experience the crucifixion of the people of El Salvador is not the last word, for we can also be drawn to experience their resurrection. The victim becomes the healer. . . . In church sanctuary, the victims of the violence carried out in our name can touch and heal us. [Emphasis added.]

the simple campesinos come to our churches, finding them filled with the unholy stink of success and worldly power, finding us disgustingly crammed with the sheer arrogance of being who we are. Speaking for our better selves, they demand that we turn from our vacuous self-content and embrace their (our!) cause. Dare we turn down their request? Dare we refuse to provide them asylum and sanctuary? Oh, no, no, no. Their righteous curse will then fall on our bloated spiritual corpulence, and we will know ourselves for what we are: Americans, gringos, los de encima, the bad guys. But the righteous liberal God cannot let that happen. Foul as we are, He can yet use us for His holy purpose, the redemption of the world from capitalism and its illusory surrogate, bourgeois freedom. And if He can thereby subvert the policy of the United States, so much the better.

As YOU wearily drive home from Mass, your wife is still bubbling with the infectious enthusiasms generated by the arrival of the refugees. Yu'd rather concentrate on avoiding the potholes in the street, but she won't let you:

"Weren't they beautiful, honey? So simple and strong."

"Yeah."

"And Father Tom. It obviously means so much to him. He said we should just call him Tomas when we're in church. Isn't that nice?

"Yeah."

"Listen, you'll keep Tuesday evening open, won't you? He asked us to."

"What for?"

"The bean and rice Solidarity Supper. Promise me you'll come."

"I'll think about it."

Sure you'll think about it. For abour five seconds. You've probably got better things to do that evening. Like canceling your pledge ... again.