When the Other Enters the Building: Religious Identity and Workforce Diversity in Catholic Organizations in Migration Contexts

Faith-based organizations are significant but underexplored sites of cross-cultural integration in migration contexts. While scholarship has focused on migrants’ experiences, less attention has been paid to how receiving institutions navigate their own religious identity when migration-driven diversity enters their midst. This article addresses this gap by introducing the Identity in Diversity (IDiD) framework, an instrument for assessing organizational orientations toward diversity and collective identity. Rooted in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his concepts of le visage (the face of the Other) and le tiers (the third party), the framework proposes four organizational identity styles (achromatic, monochrome, rainbow, kaleidoscopic) reflecting different orientations toward difference, from functional indifference through formal tolerance to transformative encounter. The scale was validated across five studies (n > 2000) and applied in a mixed-methods study within a Catholic diocesan institution in Australia where 56.6% of staff have a migration background. Findings reveal a significant aspirational gap—staff strongly prefer the kaleidoscopic style (+0.74), while normative scores for rainbow and achromatic styles decline, indicating a demand for transformative inclusion grounded in shared vocation rather than formal tolerance. We conclude that Levinasian ethics, extended through le tiers to institutional contexts, offers a philosophically robust and empirically operationalizable foundation for rethinking how faith-based organizations respond to the ethical demands of migration.