Leo Guardado has written a fine, persuasive analysis of the significance of sanctuary as a way of understanding the nature and role of the church challenged by the fact of massive human displacement through political violence. The book opens with the description of his painful sundering from his family as he fled from El Salvador in 1991 on a terrifying journey to the United States. This and similar testimonies are the backdrop to the opening chapter, which narrates the history of the sanctuary movement from its emergence in the 1980s and 1990s in response to influx of refugees from horrific civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. Guardado sets out the religious and philosophical inspiration of this movement before exploring the biblical and ecclesial/historical significance of sanctuary up to Vatican II and after. There is a paradox here. The sacramental and humanising vision of the Second Vatican Council provides a foundation for a reconstructed notion of sanctuary, which Guardado thinks we need; at the same time, the revised code of Canon Law of 1983 removes the legal status of sanctuary in the apparent belief that the concept is not compatible with a modern understanding of church and state.

Whatever its official standing in the church, the practical and imaginative dimensions of the concept of sanctuary are, for Guardado, indispensable. Many of the complexities are evident in the historical chapter, where tensions opened up between the humanitarian response of churches in Arizona, catalyzed by the extraordinary energy and vision of Jim Corbett, a goatherder, Friend (Quaker), and philosopher, and direct-action activists in Chicago, who saw the sanctuary movement as a vehicle for wider systemic change. The tension between humanitarian and political understandings raises the question of means and ends, as well as the possibility of conceiving of sanctuary as constitutive of the church. In this sense the book can be seen as a work of comparative ecclesiology; perhaps sanctuary is a possible model of the church, in addition to those classically described by Avery Dulles.

A deeper examination of the theoretical roots of sanctuary draws in Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, but the testimony for a formal ecclesial restructuring is found in the humanizing Gaudium et Spes and its solidarity with the world of today from the documents of the Latin American bishops at Medellín and from Óscar Romero.

Widening the lens from the sanctuary movement of forty years ago means acknowledging key differences from today, however. The activists of this earlier period were motivated in part by the recognition that the United States was a direct cause of the violent instability in Central America, and therefore bore some responsibility for the suffering it generated. Comparisons with anti–Vietnam War protesters and, more distantly, the underground railroad networks of the slavery era, were plausible. By contrast, the tendency now to demonize would-be migrants as existential threat, as merely economic migrants, or even as delinquents is much more widespread; at the same time, the causal role of rich nations in their suffering is, for many, less evident.

The insistence by Emmanuel Levinas on the unconditional ethical responsibility for the vulnerable human other is an important reminder of their claim, regardless of “merit.” Guardado might usefully have referred to the work of Giorgio Agamben on the figure of the homo sacer, the victim whose peripheral presence as an “exception” to the legitimate order is essential to the survival of society. One biblical antecedent of this curious motif would be Cain, protected from vengeance by the mark placed on his forehead (Guardado’s scriptural survey focuses instead on alleged cities of sanctuary). The figure of the homo sacer offers a reproach and a critique of the nation-state, unable under modern conditions to provide protection for all.

Nevertheless, this is a persuasive and thought-provoking study, which as Guardado asserts, “sought to provide theological scaffolding around the central concept and practice of sanctuary that is still not a permanent pillar of the church”—even as the church needs this pillar if it is to be the legitimate bearer of good news (230–31). The power of the sanctuary as lived practice but also as metaphor might serve as a new or recovered model of church, with rich implications, for example, as a way of rearticulating the church as a place of safety in the wake of clerical sex abuse. Whatever these possibilities, one merit of this fine study is Guardado’s grounded fidelity to a specific crisis and testimony: the decades-long anguish of Central America’s vulnerable poor.