Welcome back.
Those two words carry more weight than they might appear to. After six years of silence, Convergent Streams returns to print and to your hands, your screens, and your communities. When this publication first launched in 2013, it was born from a conviction that the Old Catholic Churches International had something to say to a world in need of both truth and tenderness. That conviction has not wavered. If anything, the past six years have sharpened it into something urgent.
We return in a moment that demands we speak.
The theme of this edition is immigration, and we make no apology for the directness of our stance. What is happening to immigrants and migrants across the globe, and most visibly within the United States, is not a policy debate. It is a moral crisis. Since returning to office, the current administration has pursued what it describes as the largest deportation campaign in American history, with ICE alone having deported roughly 540,000 people by January 2026. The number of people held in ICE detention rose nearly 75 percent in 2025, climbing to the highest level ever recorded, with billions of dollars being spent not on public safety, but on pressuring people to give up their legal rights and accept deportation. Detention centers, often housed in converted industrial warehouses never intended for human habitation, have drawn mounting allegations of medical neglect and abuse, while the very oversight bodies charged with investigating those conditions have been gutted.
Perhaps most heartbreaking is what is happening to the youngest among the vulnerable. In 2025, ICE detained 265 and deported 132 young people who held Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a legal protection created by Congress specifically for immigrant minors who had already survived abuse, abandonment, or neglect in their countries of origin. These are not threats to public safety. These are children. And they are being cast out.
The Old Catholic Churches International will not be silent in the face of this. Our tradition has always held that the measure of a community’s faithfulness is found not in its liturgical precision but in its treatment of those the world discards. Jesus did not ask for documentation before he healed the sick, fed the hungry, or welcomed the stranger. Neither do we.
OCCI stands in solidarity with every immigrant, every refugee, every undocumented person seeking safety and dignity. We stand with the communities accompanying them. We stand against the dehumanizing machinery of mass detention and deportation wherever it operates in the world, not only in the United States. And through the work of our Office of Faith, Justice, and Humanitarian Efforts and initiatives like the Veritas Manifesta Project, we are committed to moving that solidarity from words into action, into legal resources, community preparation, interfaith networks, and the kind of stubborn, practical love that refuses to abandon its neighbor.
Convergent Streams exists to give voice to that work. We are grateful to everyone who held on through the silence, and to all who are joining us for the first time. The stream has been running all along. We are simply, at last, back at the water’s edge together.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
The Right Rev. Gregory Godsey, OSFoc is the Founder and Managing Editor of Convergent Streams. He is also the Presiding Bishop of the Old Catholic Churches International. He is the Bishop Ordinary of the Diocese of Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Pastor at Saint Francis Parish and Outreach in Augusta, Georgia. He has been a Priest and Bishop since 1999. He lives in North Augusta, South Carolina with his wife, daughter and various pets.