Newsletter Vol. 1 Issue 19

Photo Credit: Endner, Gustav Georg (1754-1824), Engraver
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (1720-1778), Artist
New York Public Library
 

 
After journeying with Jesus in the Second Weeks of the Exercises, St. Ignatius invites the retreatant to enter more deeply into the life of Christ in the Third Week: The Passion. In the Third Week, we “pray for the gift of being able to sorrow with Jesus in sorrow, to be anguished with Jesus’ anguish” (SE #203).  As we continue our Discernment Series and move closer to Holy Week, we turn to explore how Christ suffers in our Church and in our country today in the sufferings of people of color. Before looking at particular groups, we begin with racial justice in the Catholic Church. 

Our Christian tradition offers us great ethical and theological tools for grappling with the realities of racism in our world and our nation. Repeatedly throughout the Old Testament, God chooses to take the side of the outcast: the widow, the orphan, and the poor. Many of the Hebrew prophets like Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah critique the harsh conditions the religious and political elite put on “the people,” subjecting them to misery. God decides to radically intervene, and through the person of Jesus Christ, is born to a single girl, born in an animal stable, visited by poor shepherds, and becomes a refugee when forced to flee Herod’s mass execution. Jesus proclaims a Kingdom of God where all are included and where the poor are blessed. Like the prophets, he challenges the political and religious elites, and ultimately, is killed for standing with the women, sinners, and outcasts. 

Jesus stood with the outcasts of the world because God created all of us in the divine image and likeness of God, and saw us as good. Jesus took what the Church calls a preferential option for the poor, a stance that while his kingdom was and is for all, some are disproportionately excluded because they are considered “less-than” the taken-for-granted, normal, and good, people. We have been examining Jesus’ preferential option through the lens of racism. Viewed through our own Catholic Social Teaching, we can see the dignity of people of color is lost when they are historically, culturally, structurally, and individually affected by racist acts, policies, laws, patterns, and more. 

At the same time, despite rich theological and ethical tools, our Church exists in a human world and has unconsciously and consciously mimicked the religious and political elite in Jesus’ time who turned a blind eye to the suffering of those on the margins. As Bryan Massingale writes, “when the Catholic Church historically has engaged this issue, it’s always done so in a way that’s calculated to not disturb white people or not to make white people uncomfortable.” In his book, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Massingale notes that when the Bishops generally make statements on racism, they proceed without a systemic analysis and an “overly optimistic perspective that fails to account for how deeply entrenched racial bias is in American culture.” Discussions of racism do not make their way into the average Catholic parish, either. 

To recognize these discrepancies and the tendency to keep white Catholics comfortable is not intended to simply critique the Catholic Church. Bringing the failures of the Catholic Church to the forefront is to allow light to shine in a space of darkness. It is to take a long, loving look at the reality of the Church’s tepid response to racism and ask for the grace of the Third Week, that is, to know the sufferings of Christ and feel sorrow for how Christ suffers in the experiences of people of color. It is an invitation, especially for white Catholics, to become profoundly uncomfortable. The purpose is not futile: it is a journey of accompaniment – an invitation not only to Jesus’ male disciples but the women who accompanied him through his Passion and death on the cross, even if it outed them as being allied with the enemy of the political and religious elites of his day.