What wound do you think needs healing in the Catholic Church?

This is the question that Jeannie Gaffigan, writer and executive producer of The Jim Gaffigan Show, and Mike Lewis, editor of the website Where Peter Is, ask every guest on U.S. Catholic’s new podcast, Field Hospital. The term is taken from Pope Francis, who describes the church’s mission by saying, “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”

For author and lawyer Linda Dakin-Grimm, one of these wounds is the lack of care for immigrants and refugees in our country. When she first saw kids coming into the United States unaccompanied, Dakin-Grimm says, she blamed it on a failure of parenting. “These kids are somebody else’s problem,” she says of her thinking. But then she started looking at what scripture says about welcoming the stranger. Now, she says, “I can’t be a Catholic . . . and go blithely living my upper-middle-class life in white suburbia” with no concern for immigrant and refugee children.

Since 2016, when Dakin-Grimm started working pro bono on immigration, she has worked with more than 75 unaccompanied children and separated families. In 2020 she published a book about her work titled Dignity and Justice: Welcoming the Stranger at Our Border (Orbis Books).

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