The Catholic Church has a role to both promote racial healing and help dispel the fears that many people have of those who are unlike them, said Chicago Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Perry, who was recently named chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism.
When Deacon Arthur Miller reflects on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, he’s convinced at least 1% of the Money, Mississippi, community knew that it was wrong but none of them had the courage to speak out.
People must “reject all forms of racism, bigotry and injustice” and recognize “we are each made by God and are deserving of respect and dignity because of just that,” Washington Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory said Feb. 3.
The history of Black Catholics and other marginalized people in the U.S. church covering more than two centuries is one worth knowing and can guide the church’s response to the challenges of racism and social justice, historian Shannen Dee Williams believes.
Imagining what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., might say if he were alive today, retired Bishop Edward K. Braxton of Belleville, Illinois, delivered a homily in the voice of the slain civil rights leader to address how racism continues to impact the church and society as a whole.
When the U.S. bishops decided to continue with their annual fall meeting despite a pandemic, they took it online, shortened its length but also its scope, leaving only the most essential matters on the to-do list.And at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 2020 fall meeting, racism was part of that essential business.
The annual Ignatian Family Teach-in for Justice, the largest Catholic social justice gathering in the United States, is known for dispensing sharp opinions.
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.
Father Augustus Tolton, the first identified Black priest ordained for the United States, would likely be disappointed by what he sees going on in the United States today, said Father David Jones, pastor of St. Benedict the African Parish in Chicago.
The global protests over the long-standing plague of white supremacy, most recently manifested in the police and vigilante murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, have put our nation and church on the precipice of monumental change or devastating setback.
