From February 15–17, eleven Catholic bishops from the United States, Canada, and Latin America gathered in Tampa, Florida, for a meeting described as a time of “prayer, dialogue, and pastoral discernment.” They addressed pressing pastoral challenges facing the Church across the Americas, with particular attention to migration, and released a joint statement underscoring the Church’s commitment to walk together in unity and compassion.

Their concluding document, titled “Message to the People of God on Pilgrimage in the Americas,” affirms a central conviction: “No migrant is a stranger to the Church.” The message highlights the interconnected realities of poverty, human mobility, vulnerability, and polarization across national boundaries, and calls the Church to coordinated, compassionate action rooted in the Gospel.

The statement rejects any reduction of human mobility to merely political or economic categories:

The bishops called for broader coordination and collaboration across continents so that the Church “may be a concrete sign of hope, a place of welcome, and protection” from migrants’ countries of origin through their journeys to final destinations. They invited civil authorities to uphold the lives, rights, and dignity of all people who migrate — affirming both the responsibility of states to regulate migration and the Church’s insistence that legislation must place at the center the inalienable dignity of the human person.

One Church in the Americas

Beyond migration, the document notes common pastoral concerns across the Americas: the plight of the poor and vulnerable, the rights of indigenous peoples, human trafficking, and the need to overcome political polarization that “wounds public discourse and weakens social cohesion.”

“We are one Church in the Americas. From this unity, we wish to serve with greater dedication, to accompany with greater closeness, and to proclaim with renewed courage the hope that springs from the Heart of the Savior.”