Catholics 'must go beyond relief aid' in refugee ministry, says woman religious honored by UN

SÃO PAULO (OSV News) -- Brazilian-born Sister Rosita Milesi said Catholics have to "go beyond the idea of simply providing humanitarian relief for migrants and start working for their full integration."

She is the recipient of the 2024 Nansen Refugee Award, given by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, to individuals or organizations who work for the protection of refugees in outstanding ways.

Seventy-nine-year-old Sister Rosita, who was honored on Oct. 14, in Geneva, has been acting on behalf of migrants and refugees in Brazil on several fronts over the past four decades, something that she could achieve due to her multifaceted vocations as a lawyer, a Scalabrinian sister and a project leader.

She first began to work with migrants at the end of the 1980s. A few years later, side by side with the UNHCR, Sister Rosita accepted the challenge of proposing a new law for refugees in Brazil.

"There was a very critical topic: We had to expand the concept of refugee, thus assimilating the spirit of the 1984 Cartagena Declaration," she told OSV News.

The Cartagena Declaration, a nonbinding Latin American document for the protection of refugees, established a definition that refugees are people who "fled their country" due to threats like "violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights" or other circumstances.

The broader definition was one of the basic elements of the new Brazilian refugees act, which Sister Rosita helped to get approved in Congress in 1997.

Two years later, she realized that the newly-arrived needed to receive guidance and legal assistance as soon as they got into Brazil. That's when she founded the Instituto Migrações e Direitos Humanos (Migrations and Human Rights Institute, known for its Portuguese acronym IMDH).

IMDH has offered direct assistance to thousands of immigrants and refugees over its almost 25 years of existence. At the same time, it has pursued intense advocacy work to influence the government and other civic institutions to boost public policies for refugees.

It also changed many lives. Yorman Pereda, a 32-year-old Venezuelan national, got into Brazil through the city of Pacaraima (in the Amazonian state of Roraima) in 2020, coming from Porlamar, a city in the Caribbean island of Margarita. He was sent to Brazil's capital city, Brasilia, as part of the policy of integration adopted by the government. But he has never received any government help.

"The only person who helped me was Sister Rosita and the IMDH," he told OSV News.

Pereda began to work in upholstery cleaning as soon as he could reorganize his life in the new country, but he lacked basic equipment.

"That's when a friend of mine told me to look for Sister Rosita. I told her my story and the IMDH decided to help me," he described. The institute bought a vacuum cleaner for his business, as part of its program to help microentrepreneurs.

Despite several difficulties -- he doesn't have the means to invest in advertising -- Pereda has been making a living thanks to Sister Rosita's assistance.

"The IMDH is a very important institution. It has helped many people," he said.

In almost 40 years working with refugees, Sister Rosita went through two complex crises. The first one was after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when thousands of Haitians came to Brazil to flee the turmoil in their country.

"It was a great challenge. There was an overall lack of conditions and experience in Brazil to deal with such a large migratory flux. People got into (the Amazonian state of) Acre and faced a depressing situation," she recalled.

In 2016, millions of Venezuelans started to leave their nation, which faced a severe economic and political crisis, and some of them came to Brazil. Sister Rosita accompanied the sufferings of many Venezuelans, but noticed that this time Brazilian society was more prepared to welcome the refugees, including church organizations.

"More than 35 years ago, when I began working with migrants and refugees, only a handful of Catholic groups focused on them. Now, there's a high number of church groups acting on that front," she said.

At the same time, many in the church still ignore what "welcoming" immigrants is really about, she said. It's necessary to deeply understand Pope Francis' four words to meet the challenges of migration: welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating, Sister Rosita emphasized.

Over the past decades, she not only brought the theme to the table in the Brazilian church, but also helped to create and shape groups and networks of initiatives to help immigrants, like Solidarity Network for Migrants and Refugees, or RedeMir, in Brazil, and the Latin American and Caribbean Ecclesial Network on Migration, Displacement, Refuge and Human Trafficking -- or the CLAMOR Network.

"I first met her in 2012, when I began to work in the Amazon. As we grew closer, we agreed more and more to bring the theme of human trafficking to the debate over immigration," Sister Roselei Bertoldo, a member of the Rede Um Grito pela Vida (A Cry For Life Network, which works in the prevention of human trafficking), told OSV News.

In 2016, Sister Rosita invited Sister Roselei to join the creation of CLAMOR Network. Together, they were able to demonstrate to their colleagues the importance of discussing human trafficking, and in 2023 a commission inside CLAMOR was created to deal specifically with that problem.

"I see her as a person who inspires me. ... Her testimony is very powerful, and she has been a fundamental partner in our battle against human trafficking," Sister Roselei said.

Despite so much progress, Sister Rosita thinks that there's much more to be done to advance the work with migrants and refugees in the church of Brazil. The goal, indeed, is to follow Pope Francis' words for the 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, observed Sept. 29: "God walks with his people."

"It's a people without any kind of distinction, a people that constitutes one family -- the human family," she concluded.