In Portland, Oregon, other people dressed in inflatable frog costumes – The Portland Frog Brigade – danced out of doors immigration workplaces. In Chicago, oldsters and neighbors walked youngsters to and from faculty, forming “magic schoolbuses” for households who feared detention.
1000’s of American citizens have taken to the streets since fall 2025 to protest towards U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ways. Those public demonstrations come with the extra familiar-looking protest indicators and chanting, in addition to different on a regular basis tactics of revealing team spirit with minority teams being centered.
The American citizens participating come from many various religion traditions, and none. However this kind of team spirit rings a bell in my memory of “accompaniment,” an idea I find out about as a pupil of American Catholicism and Roman Catholicism extra widely.
The speculation of accompaniment is rooted in trendy Catholic social idea. It was once first coined via the past due Pope Francis in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” or “Joy of the Gospel.”
Accompaniment and its historical past
Apostolic exhortations are letters written via popes that urge Catholics and non-Catholics alike to show their religion in on a regular basis movements reminiscent of taking good care of neighbors, the deficient and the dispossessed. Additionally they reply to precise problems and demanding situations of the actual time, reminiscent of famine, conflict and poverty.
Francis penned his name to motion quickly after he turned into the pope in the course of escalating world humanitarian and refugee crises – significantly, the demise of 1000’s of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to the island of Lampedusa, close to Sicily, in June 2013.
Francis demanded that Catholics and the wider world group take note of the honour and humanity of migrants and known as for a reawakening of other people’s consciences “so that what happened would not be repeated.” Francis known as the apathy to the demise of migrants “globalization of indifference” to struggling.
Pope Francis on the island of Lampedusa, southern Italy, on July 8, 2013.
AP Photograph/Gregorio Borgia
He instructed Catholics world wide to turn love and mercy for essentially the most prone other people in demonstrable tactics. Calling it the “art of accompaniment,” he used the imagery of strolling along the deficient and setting out sandals in an indication of team spirit.
As the primary pope from Latin The united states, Francis’ teachings on accompaniment had been rooted within the Catholic liberation theology that unfold all over the area within the past due Sixties and Nineteen Seventies.
Liberation theology embraces hanging the desires of essentially the most prone first and is grounded in biblical teachings. It prioritizes a “preferential option for the poor.”
Francis stands inside an extended custom of Catholic social instructing that may be traced again to Pope Leo XIII. Leo was once the primary trendy pope to coin the time period “social doctrine,” an legit Catholic instructing on how one can construct and care for simply and equitable economies.
Leo issued the papal record “Rerum Novarum” – “On Capital and Labor” – in Might 1891 in the course of the Business Revolution. Rerum Novarum emphasised the honour of labor and known as for truthful wages and humane running prerequisites.
The Catholic Church lately and immigration
In more moderen instances, Pope Leo XIV – like his predecessor Francis and the sooner pope whose identify he selected – has embraced a preferential possibility for the deficient and an ethic of accompaniment. On Oct. 9, 2025, he issued his first exhortation, “Dilexi Te” – “I Have Loved You” – proceeding Francis’ and the fashionable church’s focal point on taking good care of prone other people.
In a bit devoted to migrants, he wrote that people will likely be judged via how neatly they deal with people who find themselves deficient, unwell, imprisoned and overseas. Demonstrating love and worry for the deficient, Leo emphasised, was once a “hallmark of faith.”
Leo additionally counseled a Nov. 12 pastoral message from the U.S. Catholic Council of Bishops urging immigration reforms that “recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons,” whilst keeping up nationwide safety pursuits, as each had been conceivable. He instructed Catholics and different “people of goodwill” to “listen carefully” to this message.
Accompaniment and other people of goodwill
Accompaniment is uniquely Catholic, however the social idea it describes is going some distance past any spiritual denomination. From Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., on a regular basis Catholics and non-Catholics alike were demonstrating team spirit with the immigrants.
Other people protest in Los Angeles towards the immigration crackdown on Jan. 30, 2026.
AP Photograph/Jae C. Hong
They’re rejecting ICE’s competitive ways whilst demonstrating that they price human dignity and human rights.
Accompaniment seems to be a commonplace language of team spirit – some way for “people of goodwill,” as Leo put it – to face in team spirit with essentially the most prone other people and refuse to simply accept immigration insurance policies they see as being dehumanizing.
