The visions of peace, equality, and love will resonate powerfully during the 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, as the tumult of 2020 continues into the new year, said clergy and laity in the Diocese of Brooklyn. The annual MLK day prayer service is set for noon Jan. 18 at Our Lady of Victory Church, in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The year was 1917. America had just entered World War I. It was also a somber time in church history — black Catholics were not welcomed to worship within the same space as their white Catholic brothers and sisters.
Marking the Sept. 9 feast day of St. Peter Claver with a Mass at a historically Black Catholic church in southern Maryland, Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory urged Catholics to recognize reflections of Christ in others, just as that saint saw Christ in the enslaved Africans he served.
This year’s Feast Day Mass for St. Peter Claver in Brooklyn, according to the homilist, was a momentous step toward healing “America’s original sin” — racism.
Joe Biden’s choice of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, as his vice presidential running mate elicited broad smiles from key black Catholics. Others, though, started criticizing her record nearly as soon as the pick was publicized Aug. 11.
