This is my confession:

I didn’t take communion at my father’s funeral.

He died last October, and there was a Catholic Mass and Rosary at the Colorado church he attended. Like my father, I was born and raised Catholic. Like my father, I once considered the priesthood as a vocation. Unlike my father, I strayed from my faith. I haven’t been a practicing Catholic for decades.

It’s out of respect for the sanctity of communion that I don’t participate in the sacrament while attending Catholic services, which I do occasionally for weddings, funerals and work. Communion, an act of breaking bread together that is tied to the Last Supper, is a cornerstone of the Catholic faith. And that’s why the Archdiocese of St. Louis filed a federal lawsuit this month against the Ste. Genevieve County sheriff and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

For months, the immigrants held at the jail by ICE — most of them marked for eventual deportation — have been denied the opportunity to participate in communion, presented to them by a Catholic priest. The lawsuit also claims they can’t meet with priests alone to offer their confession, another staple of the religion.

The practice is a violation of the religious freedom that America was built on, the lawsuit alleges. St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell T. Rozanski and the Rev. Christopher Schroeder, a University City priest, are listed as the plaintiffs.

“Federal ICE detainees at the jail have repeatedly asked to see a priest and to receive the sacraments. The Sheriff of Ste. Genevieve County, his Chief Deputy, and his Jail Administrator have refused to permit it, citing their visitation policy,” the lawsuit alleges.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in other federal jurisdictions, and judges have issued orders protecting detainees’ rights to practice their faith. Whether that happens in the Eastern District of Missouri, where one federal judge has been openly hostile to immigrants and others have refused to protect immigrants' civil rights, remains to be seen.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security denied that the federal government was standing in the way of detainees and their faith.

The timing of the case reminded me of my father’s death a year ago this month. So did this paragraph from the lawsuit that explains the importance of communion to the Catholic faith:

“Because the celebration of communion is a central piece of the Catholic faith, and because the transubstantiation that occurs in this sacrament involves the real presence of Christ, the Catholic faith imposes strict rules on how communion may be administered,” it says. “Communion may only be administered by a minister specifically appointed for the purpose. Catholics receiving communion may only receive the host directly from a priest or an appointed minister.”

At my father’s funeral, the priest did something I hadn’t seen before. He asked people like me, who weren’t receiving communion, to stand in line with everybody else, participate in the communal practice and simply cross our arms when we reached the priest. The priest blessed us. In that moment, I felt connected to the faith of my father, the faith of my childhood.

I've interviewed many detainees at the Ste. Genevieve County jail, including some who are deeply faithful to the Catholic Church. I can’t imagine the pain of not only being incarcerated and facing an uncertain future, but also of being separated from the faith that sustains any sense of hope.

“The only thing I could do was pray,” Roland N’Guessan told me recently of his time in ICE custody, which included a stay in Ste. Genevieve.

N’Guessan, who lives in Florissant, is an immigrant from Ivory Coast. He raised his family in a Catholic church in St. Louis. He was released from custody last month as lawyers from the Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry got his deportation case reopened.

The power of prayer is what led to the name of the county that is now standing in the way of Catholics practicing their faith. Saint Genevieve famously told the people of Paris in 451 AD to stay and pray that brutal conqueror Attila the Hun would bypass the city, which he did. Now the county that bears the saint’s name is being sued by Catholic clerics who want to serve the immigrants detained there — men and women who are pleading for religious freedom.

“That this policy targets some of our nation’s most vulnerable — civil ICE detainees awaiting deportation to foreign countries — exacerbates a constitutional concern and a canonical one, because it withholds from the weakest among us the thing most precious to all of us,” the lawsuit says.

Rozanski has been vocal about the mass deportation policy that created this crisis, urging President Donald Trump to end the cruelty of separating Missouri families and ensnaring immigrants who do not have criminal records (and are trying to follow the steps laid out in America’s byzantine immigration system). Now he’s offering a prayer — in the form of a lawsuit — that those in detention be able to practice their faith.

If the First Amendment still matters in America, it’s not too much to ask.

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