Article Border spaces in South America: challenges and opportunities for the pastoral care of human mobility, by Carmem Lussi.

The article Border spaces in South America: challenges and opportunities for the pastoral care of human mobility, by Carmem Lussi, was presented at the Meeting on Borders of the EISAL Missionary Group, held in Curitiba on October 8 and 9, 2015.

Communities or institutions working in border areas recognize a complexity in understanding the border reality and its subjects that goes far beyond references to a physical place. It is an interdisciplinary concept that the term 'border spaces' translates better than the traditional fixed term of 'borders', understood as a reference to geopolitical boundaries.

The intensification of migratory flows and the increase in cases of death and even humanitarian tragedies at different borders today challenge the Church and its responsibility for the fate of people on the move. Physical borders and regions bordering or related to physical borders present themselves as privileged places for encounter or abandonment, for care or discrimination, for life or death. For the witness of faith or for the discrediting of religion and of communities that identify themselves by their relationship with some form of the religious and the divine.

In this way, border areas are special fields for actors and institutions that carry in their genes and ecclesial experience the mark of Scalabrini's charism, which takes God's love for his children on the move as a priority.

The text collects some reflections to clarify what the discourse needs to include when it wants to think pastorally about border areas, and proposes some approaches for interpreting the socio-ecclesial challenge that borders present today in the South American context.

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