The other organisations taking part are: Gleniti Baptist Church (Timaru), South West Baptist Church (Christchurch) and the Society of St Vincent de Paul (Nelson)

The pilot intake will consist of up to 30 refugees now living in Jordan or Lebanon.

The CORS is designed to:

• Provide an alternative and additional form of admission for refugees to New Zealand, to complement the annual quota.
• Provide an additional opportunity for community organisations to actively engage in refugee resettlement, and to build local communities that welcome refugees.
• Enable sponsored refugees to quickly become independent and self-sufficient in New Zealand.

"We believe this programme will have many benefits for the refugees, the community organisations, and New Zealand communities," says Caritas Director Julianne Hickey.

The Catholic partnership was created by Suzie and Pat McCarthy who took pilgrims to meet refugees who had fled from ISIS militants.

Upon their return, they established a partnership between the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (their religious community) and other Catholic organisations in Auckland.

The Catholic Diocese of Hamilton joined the partnership because of a government requirement that refugees must be settled outside of Auckland.

The partnership was formalised by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, which endorsed Caritas as the lead organisation.

"Each organisation has a skill or area of expertise they can contribute to the resettlement process," states Mrs Hickey. "By working alongside other organisations, we demonstrate what it means to be a community."

For the first two years, sponsoring organisations undertake to provide rental accommodation, core furniture and household goods for the refugees they sponsor, plus community orientation and services, and help to find sustainable employment.

Source

• Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand
• NZ Catholic
• Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment
• New Zealand Herald
• Image: goabroad.com

Yet the stir around Lampedusa is itself worth looking into. The pope said such tragedies are "shameful," but I would describe Europe's emotional state as one of embarrassment. The embarrassment relates to our reluctance to confront the hypocrisy embedded in how we think about immigrants from the poor and broken parts of the world. On the one hand, we have high moral standards about our duty of care to refugees fleeing lives of squalor, fear and oppression, and these are embedded in various international treaties and national laws. On the other hand, if we applied those standards generally, we would have to accept that over a billion people have some legitimate claim to refugee status.

Who are those billion? Most women in the Middle East and perhaps Central America; homosexuals from most of the world; many of the world's indigenous peoples; most inhabitants of failed states like Somalia and the Central African Republic; everyone but the elite in totalitarian dictatorships like Eritrea, North Korea and Uzbekistan; the 12 million people without citizenship of any state; religious and ethnic minorities in intolerant countries like Pakistan and Burma; all the civilians in war zones like Syria and Baghdad; India's untouchables; China's Tibetans; the vast number of refugees interned for decades in long-term camps in poor countries, like the Somalis living in Kenya or the ethnic Nepalis expelled by Bhutan - and so on. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: World News Post