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Today is a Federal holiday in the United States — the only one in the American calendar designated in honor of a single individual. That individual, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous black leader to come out of the Civil Rights movement, and the closest thing Americans have to a national hero. Cornell is certainly doing its part to honor King’s memory. Earlier today I received this email from our esteemed president, David J. Skorton:
Dear Cornellians:
Welcome back to Cornell for the start of the Spring 2008 semester. Today marks both the first day of classes in Ithaca and our national observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is a day to remember the life and legacy of a man who devoted his life to promoting racial equality and social justice and whose commitment to creating change through nonviolence has inspired millions in our own country and throughout the world.
Dr. King’s message resonates on our campuses, as we seek to support and learn from each other to create a more caring community. Building on Dr. King’s legacy, several Cornell units in Ithaca (including the Public Service Center, Campus Life, the CRESP Center for Transformative Action, and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County) have joined with community partners and Ithaca College for the 14th annual celebration of the life and work of Dr. King today at the Greater Ithaca Activities Center.
Beginning this coming Thursday, January 24, and every Thursday through February 14, we will continue the celebration of Dr. King’s legacy with the “Soup and Hope” series. You are invited to bring a soup bowl to Sage Chapel at noon and share soup and bread while hearing talks by community leaders who are working for social change.
The series will set the stage for Cornell’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture on February 19, at 4:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel. This year’s speaker will be veteran civil rights leader Vincent Harding, co-founder of Veterans of Hope, an educational initiative that encourages community building by drawing on the life stories of those who, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have struggled for freedom and justice.
As Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote in an essay on the meaning of the holiday that bears his name, today is “a day of interracial and intercultural cooperation and sharing. No other day of the year brings so many peoples from different cultural backgrounds together in such a vibrant spirit of brother and sisterhood. Whether you are African-American, Hispanic or Native American, whether you are Caucasian or Asian-American, you are part of the great dream Martin Luther King, Jr. had for America. This is not a black holiday; it is a peoples’ holiday. And it is the young people of all races and religions who hold the keys to the fulfillment of his dream.” (http://www.thekingcenter.org/holiday/index.asp)
I hope you will keep Dr. King in your thoughts today, and join us in keeping his spirit alive on our campus throughout the coming month and year.
David J. Skorton
President, Cornell University
It’s such a sad thing, really, to see how badly the secular world is in need of heroes and saints. The hagiography of Martin Luther King was rehashed for us annually in public school; in the lower grades we used to have a special assembly in his honor (either before or after the holiday) in which people would read poems (the closest they could get to prayers in such a context) dedicated to King. I remember being in the school choir and singing songs especially in his honor. And of course we would get a speech from the school principal reminding us how we should try to keep his spirit in our school, and in our lives as a whole. Apparently some things stay consistent all the way through graduate school.
The only problem, of course, is that King is an utterly inappropriate object for this kind of devotion. Cornell being a university, I think it particularly shameful that they would persist in calling him “Dr. King” throughout this little message, despite the overwhelming evidence that King plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral dissertation. If Boston University had any academic integrity, his degree would have been posthumously revoked. (But instead, they established scholarships in honor of their school’s most famous cheat.) Incidentally, many of King’s other works were plagiarized too, apparently including his famous I Have a Dream speech. Is that the spirit we want kept alive in the university?
Beyond his problems with academic integrity, King’s personal life was far from admirable. It’s fairly widely known by now that King had numerous adulterous affairs, and (somewhat ironically for a man famous for preaching nonviolence) he sometimes brutalized the prostitutes he hired. Finally, King had significant connections with known communists, and with organizations known to be sympathetic to communism. A powerful leader he may have been, but he was not a notably good person. It takes a lot of revisionist history to turn this man into someone for whom a school assembly should be held.
Normally these details about King’s past simply pass unmentioned, at least by anybody who is eager to prove that they are politically correct and non-racist. When the sordid stories do come up, you sometimes hear sober reflections on how very great people can still have their flaws, we all have clay feet, etc. This is a ridiculous justification given how thoroughly America has beatified King. It’s true, of course, that all of us (with three historical exceptions) are born tainted by sin, and thus are prone to make mistakes. But virtue, as Aristotle understood, is something that affects all different aspects of a person’s life. A man might have small flaws (say, a tendency to be late, to lose his temper a little too easily, or to forget about things he promised to do) and still be called, with reasonable accuracy, a person of character. Someone who falsifies his academic work and hires and beats prostitutes cannot be called a man of character, and there’s no evidence that King ever repented of these mistakes or mended his ways. Does everyone have clay feet? Then show me the clay feet of St. Agnes (whose feast day this is.) Or perhaps that’s unfair (there being somewhat limited information now about the life of St. Agnes), so how about the clay feet of St. Padre Pio or Bl. Theresa of Calcutta? Everyone may have a few peccadilloes, but a saint should at least show significant signs of having lived a virtuous life. Martin Luther King was not a virtuous man. We might still admire certain specific actions of his, but he should not be venerated.
The problem, of course, is that our country needs saints. We need figures to admire, and paragons to show us how to live our lives. In the secular world, there’s kind of a dearth. Who are leftists and atheists supposed to look up to? Bill Clinton? Noam Chomsky? That great Man of Peace and Reason, Al Gore? No wonder they settle on King, who at least has the advantage of having been murdered by a person who probably was genuinely racist.
I know that there are some foolish liberal parishes that join the public schools in holding events to honor Martin Luther King on his national holiday. (In fact, the American bishops are said to have put his name forward as a non-Catholic figure to be honored at Pope John Paul II’s Jubilee Mass in 2000. I couldn’t find anything on whether the suggestion was accepted, which I hope means that it wasn’t.) I propose that we take a different line. Today is a day to pray for those unfortunate souls who have no better heroes in their lives than Mr. Martin Luther King, Jr. May they one day have the grace to be inspired by true saints, whose examples of faith and purity can lead them back to God.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
BRAVA!!!
Your courage inspires me. Keep up the good work.
Well put, Clara. It is particularly depressing when Catholics gush so.
There’s a high school chapel I’ve chanced to visit in Maryland where the stained glass above the sanctuary depicts said menace flanking our Lady, accompanied by Blessed Mother Theresa and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Then again - and I’ve never asked about this - the scene also features what looks to be Ghandi and Lincoln. At least MLK was baptized.
Oh, dear. With so many wonderful saints to choose from, one can only ask: WHY?
“the only one in the American calendar designated in honor of a single individual.”
Actually, there are four: Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, Washington’s Birthday, Columbus Day, and Christmas.
we can thank the former Republican Congress for changing Presidents’ Day back to the correctly titled, Washington’s Birthday.
Hear hear!
These secular saints! It makes me want to gag hearing the fulsome praise heaped on our own British ones, often by Americans. Diana, Princess of Wales: a model of modest womanhood, I read in Colleen Hammond, of all people. And conservative Americans on the subject of Winston Churchill. I mean how many thousands of innocent people do you need to kill before these guys take notice?
Colleen Hammond spoke in praise of Diana?? Perhaps it was only in praise of the modesty of some particular dress she wore on some occasion? Not that I have an interest in defending Colleen Hammond, it just seems bizarre.
Well Spoke! Well Spoke!
King is hardly a man to look up to and admire. So he had charisma and could orate… so did Hitler. If African Americans need heroes why not Mother Lange, foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence of Baltimore or Pierre Toussainte? (and there are others I can’t think of at the moment)
Well Done!
Another Saint African Americans can especially admire is St. Catherine Drexel. Her shrine is in Philadelphia.
She was known to evangelize to minorities well before MLK. Her order even had to fight against the KKK to build to help build a church in the deep South.
St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639) is the one who occurs to me.
Here’s the quote from Colleen Hammond:
“There are some positive examples in the Bible of a woman using her feminine charms for good, like Queen Esther and Judith. If you’d like a more modern example, think of Princess Diana in the early years of her marriage- how her grace and charm and impeccable feminine attire won her world-wide popularity, which she later used to focus world attention on hunger and oher crying social issues.”
She goes on “Another great example of feminine charm was Mother Teresa of Calcutta…” I consider the juxtaposition of these two women and their work in the world in extremely bad taste.
I consider the juxtaposition of these two women and their work in the world in extremely bad taste.
I quite agree. But then, tact and subtlety were never exactly Colleen Hammond’s strong points, were they?
Did Churchill really have a shady personal life? Or do you just find it distasteful when people laud his political work? That would strike me as being a slightly different thing… I mean, conservatives may be wrong to admire Churchill, but at least they would have a semi-accurate assessment of what it was they were admiring. In King’s case, practically nobody actually admires the sort of life he lived (womanizing, abusing prostitutes, and plagiarism aren’t virtuous in almost anybody’s book) but they just try not to talk about that.
I was wrong about the holidays, though. Sorry. I didn’t realize that President’s Day was back to being just Washington’s birthday, and I thought they took Columbus Day out too (which they did at least in my school district, changing it to All Cultures Day, ha ha. But it made us school kids sad when they changed that, because we didn’t get a school break for All Cultures Day.) But I should have remembered that the Federal Govt does still recognize Christmas.
What local schools, colleges, and municipalities do with Columbus Day is an outrage and more people should fight this. How can they ignore or change a federal holiday?
What if a school started calling MLK Day “peace and reconciliation day” or “mid-winter break” instead?
Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous, for sure. But of all the things in the public schools that need changing, I don’t know that that’s at the top of my list. I’d rather stick my neck out for, say, the Holy Father, or the wrongness of abortion, than for Christopher Columbus.
I’m sorry, I just don’t get this post. Anyone who has been adversely affected by racism or prejudice would see this as an unecessary, politically motivated provocation. Why singal out King? It can only belittle the brutality and entrenched nature of Jim Crow and the adverse effects it continues to have. Sure, maybe there should be a holiday as well for those who stood up to Bull Connor’s dogs, but at least when we remember Martin Luther King, they come to mind as well.
Normally I love your blog. But this post has me shaking my head. It is one thing to lament that our society is not Catholic. It is another to belittle the accomplishments of those who fought against injustice.
I think Columbus Day is worth fighting for.
The diabolical subtext to the name change of the holiday in schools and in municipalities across America is to say:
- The Natives were better off before the Europeans arrived.
- Their pure, native, Earth-friendly spirituality was taken away and they were forced to accept Christianity.
Retaining Columbus Day retains Christianity’s rightful place in history: Columbus, by bringing Christ to the Americas, saved the brutal pagan savages from a life of savagery and misery in this world and eternal suffering in the next.
Arturo, you ask, “Why signal out King?”
Because, despite the good he did he lived an immoral life. No one questions the history of racism and discrimination and the struggle against it led by King. Historical fact is just that. However, King, a so-called minister, was duplicitous. In public he wore the facade of goodness and righteousness. People saw him as a Christian, an upstanding man, a saint. I have heard him compared to Mother Theresa and put on the same level as she. Ignored are the facts that King was an adulterer, frequented prostitutes, physically abused women, plagerized his speeches. Are these the qualities of a man we wish to hold up as an example of greatness? Is this the kind of person we wish our children to emulate?
The struggle for racial and ethnic equality has been a long one and was being fought long before King came on the scene and will continue as long as there are people who give in to Satan. Yes, King was a leader in that struggle at a point in history. But there have been others of upstanding and unquestionable virtue who have also been great leaders in the struggle who are not known because they did not have the media coverage King had. The great Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas was was among the first and St. Peter Claver the greatest. One could argue that these men were not Americans nor were they of African descent, but racism is not only an American or African American issue. It exists everywhere and among all peoples.
I have been adversely affected by racism as have my ancestors. King was one among many in the struggle, and not one I would ever choose to emulate. If we are truly serious about wanting to look for someone as a “symbol” of the Civil Rights movement of the 60s the person that should be is Rosa Parks. She was a greater leader in the struggle than King ever was. It was her courage and fortitude that made a nation stand up and take notice. History has put her in Kings shadow. The reality is, King stands in her shadow.
I think Fr. Bailey covered all the most important points, but just to add: there’s a reason the Church only canonizes people who seem to have lived virtuous lives. (Some lived wicked lives for a period, then repented and mended their ways, but at least in the end they were virtuous.) She knows that, when a person is held up as worthy of admiration, certain people who are particularly inspired by the “hero” will look at their lives more closely, and imitate them in a more serious way. And she wants to make sure that the people she canonizes are worthy of emulation on this deeper level.
Imagine someone who, being inspired by King, learned a lot about his life and took him as a model. Eventually they would uncover the shady details that I’ve mentioned here — and what would this teach them? That it’s all right to cheat your way into power, as long as you use it well once you get there? That it’s acceptable to neglect your family and indulge your sinful passions, so long as your public life is devoted to a worthy cause? These are hardly the lessons we want young Americans to be learning.
I agree with Arturo – this post and many of the comments baffle me also, and I consider them quite shameful. There is nothing in the letter that Cornell distributed that suggested a hagiography of Dr. King, the person, but instead an invitation to reflect on issues of social justice.
Some of the complaints, therefore, are just obtuse. Does anyone really think that when people ask that we remember Dr. King they are asking that we emulate his womanizing or his plagiarism? (Nor does anyone somehow need the example of Dr. King’s bad behavior to know that one can “get away with” sinful behavior and hypocrisy – I learned that from other Christians pretty early in life.) Furthermore, if those are the first facts about Dr. King’s life that pop into one’s head when hearing his name, then one needs to spend more time with a history book learning about the history of racism in this country and the civil rights movement and less time thinking about the perceived (and non-existent) ‘injustice’ of being asked to remember a man and movement’s fight against institutional evil.
So Dr. King was a liar, a hypocrite and an adulterer – may he who is without sin cast the first stone. He had affiliations with people who supported communism – communist sympathizers in this country worked against social injustice and for equality while the two major political parties largely did nothing or took harmful action throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Did Dr. King ever claim to be a saint? Did he claim that he was the sole source of moral goodness in the world? Or did he claim (in that plagiarized speech) to have a dream that his children would one day live in a country where they wouldn’t be judged based on their skin color? Did he not risk his life on many occasions, and eventually lay down his life, in the fight against the evil of racism? How many times was he falsely imprisoned for his beliefs? How many times did he confront people whose eyes burned with hatred for him, and yet he himself preached non-violent resistance? His home was bombed, yet he did not retaliate (neither did many other great figures in the civil rights movement). If God blesses me with children one day, I pray that He will give them the grace to have that kind of courage and conviction in the face of evil, and I would pray that others would feel the same way. And to be offensive, I could not care less how sinful I judged other people to be in their personal lives if many imitated the public example of Dr. King’s fight against injustice. Certainly, comparing him in any way to Hitler (the ultimate model of evil in the modern consciousness) is simply beyond the pale.
As to the supposed beatification of Dr. King by America, I do not think the ‘love’ for him rises to that of Lincoln or the Founding Fathers. So why stop at Dr. King? Do we want to discuss Thomas Jefferson for a moment, perhaps start a petition to have his monument in D.C. taken down, certainly his face off of our currency, for his personal wrongdoings? Perhaps it would be better for this country to refuse to acknowledge anyone in its history as being particularly notable or worthy of emulation, unless they are Catholic saints. In this temporal world, people can, have, do, and always will, be capable of separating the message from the messenger, for we all are fallen.
It’s just plain silly to bring up non-Americans as better people for us to emulate in context of the American civil rights movement. And for all the injustice that has happened throughout history to the far corners of the globe does not mean that racism in THIS country should not be addressed, not the history of racism in THIS country and those who fought against it remembered. Furthermore, while Rosa Parks was ONE of the catalysts for the growth of the modern civil rights movement in America in the 1950s (let’s not forget that there were many who came before her, too – Paul Robeson, Oliver Brown anyone?), she did not continue as an active, front-and-center participant in the way Dr. King and others did. Heck, by that standard, we should acknowledge that Homer Plessy was just as heroic as Ms. Parks, even though the judicial system was not favorable to him.
BTW, my grandmother had a picture of Dr. King not far from the pictures she had of the popes during her lifetime. I don’t think she ever regarded him as the perfect example of moral rectitude, but as someone who needed prayers (as we all do) and whose public example was worthy of emulation.
A final note: despite the plagiarism in his dissertation, Boston University determined that the intellectual content of the work was significant and novel enough to not rescind his doctorate. It would certainly be dangerous business for other universities to get in the habit of denying that graduates of other accredited schools really didn’t have degrees that were granted. I also think you must not be aware of how much plagiarism and assorted other unethical dealings occur in the administration of graduate degrees, even by highly regarded universities. Yet it’s up to the university, not another university or simply some people posting on a blog, to award or rescind those degrees.
Easy on the accusations… when spewing off “facts” be sure you check them out. It blows your credibility otherwise. Or is this just a sounding board for like-minded individuals only?
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp
-Crunchy
What’s funny is, the link you include really doesn’t deny any of the facts I listed, except for the one about MLK Day being the only Federal holiday named for an individual… and I already retracted that claim. I’ve done fairly extensive reading on King, enough that I’m quite certain these are not mere vicious rumors. I can look for some links later if you like. (Anyway, the FBI files on King were sealed by court order, not to be opened for twenty more years, so we can’t know exactly what happened but obviously there’s been a lot of cover-up.)
As regards Boston University — that episode was utterly shameful. AG tries to indicate that I’m not in a position to judge the matter, and the link from Mr. Crunch essentially says the same, but that’s complete baloney. It’s been credibly documented that around 45% of the first half of King’s dissertation was plagiarized from other sources; the second half was less but somewhere between 20 and 30%, I believe. If a graduate student tried that today he would be sent away in disgrace. I don’t have the authority to revoke his doctorate, obviously, but I am myself a grad student writing a dissertation and I do understand about academic integrity. King’s was a capital crime in this field. Boston University surely knows that too… but do you think their final ruling was in any way affected by the fact that the subject was their university’s most famous/revered graduate? Oh, surely not!
I will not refer to him using a respectful title that he obviously does not deserve, and Cornell shouldn’t either.
I have more to say on some of these further points, but I haven’t the time right now. But to give just a summary of my position: yes, we’re all sinners, and yes, lots of people get away with being dishonest and leading disgraceful personal lives. We don’t have to stone them, but we shouldn’t hold them up as exemplars! If you want to have a virtuous society, you must take virtuous people as your objects of admiration. The secular world isn’t doing that, and this is damaging to souls. That’s the point of the post.
AG, the Cornell letter specifically calls for remembering King’s life, not just an invitation to reflect on social justice issues. As I posted, he was a leader in the civil rights movement, but he is not worthy of being given a national holiday. We cannot simply pretend that he an upstanding man. He wasn’t. The facts speak for themselves. The man lacked integrity. He didn’t “walk the walk.” He preached Christ but he didn’t live Christ. A man can spend his entire life doing good, but that does not negate the evil that he does. He effected great good. That doesn’t change the fact that he was an adulterer, abuser, frequented prostitutes and plagerised. Is it possible he repented before death? Yes. But repentance is not atonement. Nor does it change the evil he did even as it is not affected by the good he did.
One could also say that King was a good man who sinned, and we all sin. That still doesn’t make him worthy of hero status. A hero is one who rises above human limitations, often in the midst of great trials, and gives his all for the good of others. A hero is one who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, displays courage and the will for self-sacrifice for some greater good, and moral excellence. That’s not King, no matter how much we wish it were so.
King is held up as a hero and an example for children, especially African Americans. This is implicitely telling them that it’s okay to cheat in school and on your wife. It’s okay to use violence against another person. It’s okay to use women for selfish gratification. Their reasoning: if King did it so can I. Is this what we want for America’s future?
The commentary here is based on facts. They are what they are. Would that they were not. It is on those facts that I base my comments and opinions. Were these facts better known, we might not have a Martin Luther King Day. I will even go out on a limb and say that the reason we do have the holiday has less to do with the man himself and more to do with political correctness and the patronizing attitude of elected officials. One could argue that the reason we have the holiday is racist… against African Americans.
If I learned anything in my experience ministering in an African American parish it is that African Americans are far greater than we give them credit. The people I worked with and for were heroes in exactly the way I defined it above. Every day they do more to combat racism and promopte civil rights than King did in his entire life. I celebrate them. I offer them as examples.
And as far as bringing up non-Americans in the context of the American Civil Rights Movement, I hope you realize that this is not only an American issue but a global issue and that we are all in this together. Its the Human Civil Rights Movement. If we haven’t learned that yet we’re in for a big surprise. Focusing on the American Civil Rights Movement is one of the reasons genocide is taking place in Darfur. We don’t look beyond our own shores and that will be our destruction.
It would be so much easier if we could all be together talking about this. Writing comments on blogs makes me realize how much I depend on voice tones and body language in communication. It makes it so much harder without those modes of communication.
Anyway, my point is that I see this as a friendly discussion over coffee or a beer and that doesn’t always come out when I write. I’ve been very conscious lately how blog discussions can rapidly deteriorate…I’ve been part of it…when in person that wouldn’t happen. I just want everyone to know that.
“If a graduate student tried that today he would be sent away in disgrace.”
No, not really. I have a doctorate myself, and having been involved in three different institutions (two of which are highly prestigious), when it comes to dissertations, unethical things happen - students are allowed to take credit for the work of others,students don’t complete their dissertations or do incredibly shoddy work but their degrees are pushed through for university-level political reasons, etc. While thankfully uncommon, it happens, and I can’t imagine that having some separate arbitration body that would exist solely to review the thesis material of every single graduate student in the country would be particularly desirable. If King heavily plagiarized his work, it was indeed highly unethical, but there are also a number of others I’m personally aware of who also should have their degees rescinded for similar reasons. But in any event, that’s the judgment of the awarding university, not ours, and I’d be careful about implying that you have some mind-reading ability to know the reasons that Boston University ruled in the manner they did on this case, and even more so about the repentance of Dr. King at the end of his life.
“AG, the Cornell letter specifically calls for remembering King’s life, not just an invitation to reflect on social justice issues.”
Yes, but does it suggest a hagiography of Dr. King? Does it ask for people to reflect on what an admirable and virtuous person Dr. King was? According to what was in the letter, the discussions are to be about social justice issues, and the social vision that Dr. King had for America, not what a sinless man Dr. King was.
“A hero is one who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, displays courage and the will for self-sacrifice for some greater good, and moral excellence.”
Actually Fr. Bailey, that is EXACTLY a description of Dr. King. Or are you denying that Dr. King was in a position of weakness (going after both state and federal government policies), that he displayed courage (being arrested multiple times, the time he spent in jail), and self-sacrifice (he did not, after all, become wealthy from his dedication to the civil rights movement) in order to enact change among members of one of the weakest and most volunerable groups in the country. Do you honestly not grasp the plight of African-Americans in this country prior to the advent of the modern civil rights movement? I urge you to read a decent history book.
“King is held up as a hero and an example for children, especially African Americans. This is implicitely telling them that it’s okay to cheat in school and on your wife.”
Having once been an African-American child myself, I can assure that we’re not so stupid as to believe that admiration of Dr. King’s work in the civil rights movement is the equivalent (with a wink-wink, nod-nod)of encouraging lying and adultery. This lionization of Dr. King’s sinful behaviors in the African-American community simply does not exist. Really, we’re not dumb, nor do we need the non-black community in this country to explain to us who our heroes should be and why. That’s why most blacks celebrate the existence of MLK Jr. Day - he was a hero for blacks that was elevated (for the first time in history for a black man) as a hero for the country.
Really, if we want to do this smear job on Dr. King, by all means get rid of any hint of admiration for JFK (his shenanigans are just as sinful), Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Lincoln, etc. etc. We’ll just have no national heroes, but I don’t think that’s what people want, nor do I think that it’s in human nature to NOT admire heroic qualities in others, not matter how ‘clay-footed’ they may be. Or we can create our own theocracy and only have saints as heroes.
“African Americans are far greater than we give them credit”
Thank you, I absolutely agree, although Clara seems to imply that we are unfortunate souls who have no better heroes in our lives. And on a personal note, if not for Dr. King’s leadership in a movement to de-segregate the country and have blacks treated as equals, I may not be able to receive the sacraments in a Catholic Church. Because they did that you know - the clergy of the Catholic Church in parts of this country segregated their churches, refused to let blacks sit or stay for the entire Mass, and in some cases outright denied the sacraments to blacks (as happened to family friends whose ancestors had been Catholic while slaves pre-Civil War). My own mother could only receive communion in the sole ‘black’ church in her town. These practices didn’t end until the 1970s.
“Focusing on the American Civil Rights Movement is one of the reasons genocide is taking place in Darfur. ”
No, it’s not, and that’s a thoughtless and horrible statement to make. If we can’t care and be aware of the evil and injustice OUR OWN ancestors committed and perpetuated on THIS shore, we aren’t ever going to be able to care about that committed by people on victims we don’t even know. In other words, if you can’t sympathize with your neighbor, you’re not going to for a complete stranger.
By all means, have the last word/s, as I don’t care to continue this discussion, particularly after re-reading comments like this: “who at least has the advantage of having been murdered by a person who probably was genuinely racist.” Just a hint: there’s no advantage in the loss of a human life through murder. It’s a shame you couldn’t write, “he had the luck of being lynched.”
AG, please. It’s very ungenerous of you to imply that I, or Fr. Bailey, or any of the participants in this discussion are racist. That’s completely unwarranted — and how do you know which of the other participants in this discussion may or may not be African American themselves? (Or perhaps people of African ancestry who are not Americans?) You seem to assume that, in criticizing the personality cult of MLK, I am criticizing the black community. The thought honestly never occurred to me — in my experience, King is lauded and adored by all Americans alike, very much including whites. There is no reason at all to try to divide this discussion along racial lines, unless you are putting King forward as a somehow quintessential exemplar of African American culture (which I would certainly deny).
I’m not sure whether I should try to address the line-by-line or not, but in brief: look back to the original text, and you’ll see that my reference to ‘hagiography’ related to King’s story as it was told to me, repeatedly, in public schools. Obviously there was a touch of irony there, in keeping with the “secular saint” motif, but that was certainly the impression that these “history lessons” left on me, and the assemblies we held each year (reading poems dedicated or even addressed to him, singing songs to honor him, and so forth) really did seem like a secular equivalent of the kind of honor that would be given to a saint. I do think this is the ethos that has developed around MLK in our country, and I do think it’s harmful to souls, but more on that in a moment.
On the subject of academic integrity, I’m sure that unethical things do happen at times, and that’s unfortunate. Slipshod work is sometimes let through for one reason or another, people are given co-credit for projects they barely touched, etc etc. But can you name another instance of a person who is widely known and acknowledged to have plagiarized a good portion of his doctoral work, and who is nonetheless routinely referred to with an academic title? Probably this is not the most serious of King’s personal sins, but it’s one that hits close to my heart as an academic myself, just because it is deeply scandalous (in the proper Catholic sense of the term) that such an offense should be acknowledged, and that nothing should be done about it. And it seems ridiculous to me to deny that political motivations had much to do with that. It doesn’t require mind-reading, just a basic understanding of university politics, and the fact that schools don’t like to revoke the doctorates of their most famous graduates. I’m sorry, but as someone who’s lived in countries where academic dishonesty really is more or less routine, I have strong feelings about this. It’s essential, within the Academy, to keep alive people’s sense of revulsion at the thought of blatantly cheating in their scholarship. Hence, the ho-hum attitude that’s so often taken towards King’s work, even within universities, really disturbs me.
Now, enough of that, because there really is a significant question at the heart of this debate. You want to contend that MLK can still be lionized because, despite his personal failings, his political actions and his message still make him a hero and a person deserving of reverence. “Separate the message from the messenger” is your advice. The question is, can that really be done? I think the Aristotelian (or, ultimately, the Catholic) has to be inclined to say that it can’t.
To the Catholic way of thinking, human goodness is best fulfilled through a kind of character or virtue.Good character will affect the individual’s life as a whole. It will be manifested in his public and private life, in his relationship to community, to family, and to God. Likewise, breakdowns in virtue in one area will inevitably lead to breakdowns in character generally. So, the Church Fathers were adamant that sound doctrinal beliefs and upright behavior were importantly linked, and both are essential to holiness. A person who fell into heresy would eventually find that this negatively affected his behavior; likewise, the person who acts badly will find it more difficult to keep a grip on the truth.
This doesn’t always seem to be so. You might see people (think The Godfather, the first one) who behave abominably in their “public” life but who seem intensely concerned about the welfare of their families. (Of course, Michael eventually slips in this area too, making him a good example of what the Church Fathers were talking about.) You might also have people with shamefully disordered personal lives who nevertheless seem to do good public works. We shouldn’t be completely cynical about a person’s good works just because they also have some bad ones. At the same time, though, it’s important to remember that human motivation is a complicated thing. It can be hard for us to tell the difference between courage and rashness, between desire to help and desire to make a legacy for oneself, or between genuine concern and selfish ambition. This is why the Church looks at the life of a person as a whole, and not just at isolated deeds, before deciding to canonize him.
Vicious people and heretics can sometimes do or say fine things, and we may praise them in a limited sense when they do. But that can’t make them a hero or a saint. Heroes and saints need to be admirable in their lives as a whole. And it is only towards those people that we should adopt an attitude of reverence. Because, you see, when I accept someone as a hero, I now relate to that person differently. When I encounter a non-hero, be that a classmate or a political pundit or a commentator on this blog, I can’t (if I don’t know them well) assume very much about their character. So I take the things they say at face value, and decide what I think about them on their merits. As I get to know a person, I will form more of an impression about their character, and everything they say or do will be evaluated against that background. When I take a person as a hero, their words and actions will be given much more deference. If they say something that seems wrong to me, I will be more likely to pause and consider whether I might be the one who is wrong. If they do something that would normally seem to me questionable or unwise, I will be slower to assume that the report is true, or that they lacked good reasons, or (depending on the action) I may re-evaluate whether the action really is so unfortunate as I had originally thought.
So, I just have serious concerns about saying, as you recommend, “Sure, his personal life was depraved, but people understand that King is being praised for his political actions and not for his plagiarism or his womanizing or his fraternizing with communists.” On one level, sure, people can identify his work with the Civil Rights Movement as the “good” part of his life, and most would presumably agree that he made some mistakes too. But as Aristotle understood, as the Fathers understood, as St. Thomas understood… hero worship isn’t that discriminating. Once you identify King as a hero and a role model, other aspects of his life will inevitably influence you, too. Criticisms of his character — even those elements of it that you know on some level were defective — begin to feel like personal attacks or (which is a similar thing) attacks on your people as a whole. You find yourself defending some of King’s disreputable actions as being not really so bad, the sort of thing that happens all the time, etc etc. No doubt you will read his writings with a certain deference that you wouldn’t give to just any author… and if the Church Fathers are right that word and deed are importantly linked, this may well lead you into error on many points. So you see, there are real dangers in offering intense admiration to people who are not virtuous. The Church has always understood this, and this is why she has given us so many approved examples of holy people who can legitimately be the objects of admiration and emulation. She knows how important it is for us to choose good exemplars who won’t lead us astray. And I think it’s pretty obvious that someone like MLK would never have been canonized, even if he had been Catholic.
You point out in your comment that, by my standards, JFK, Jefferson, and FDR would also be unworthy of emulation. I actually couldn’t help but laugh at this… do I sound like the kind of person who would protest if a bunch of immoral liberals turn out not to be heroes? But no, you’re quite right, they’re not saints or heroes, and in fact you’ve made my point quite well. The sad thing about what I called “secular saints” is that they’re not really saints. And in most cases, it’s very obvious from even a cursory examination of their lives, that they’re not saints. Now, I think men like Kennedy and King are particularly bad exemplars, because they led more-than-usually depraved lives. But if in fact you’re right that there are no very holy people outside the Church, should this be so surprising? Truth is related to holiness. We should expect to find them together.
I hope you can see now that my final remarks about “those unfortunate souls who have no better heroes in their lives than MLK” were not by any means meant as a patronizing remark about African Americans! The unfortunate souls in question are all those who have not found the Truth, as taught by our Mother the Church, and I hope you’ll agree that we should pray for them.
AG, have you been beaten, spat on, reviled, accused of heinous things because of outward appearances? Because until you have don’t you dare play the racist card with me. BTW, some of the perpetrators were African Americans. So, if you want to be a victim, be a victim, but I will be a victor.
Clara,
I don’t think that anyone is calling you a racist directly. After all, you seem like a nice American gal who would keep those feelings hidden even if you have them. But if I were to paraphrase your post, it seems to say something like, “I feel emotionally violated because as an innocent young white girl I had to honor the memory of a plagiarizing [implication: black men can't make it on their own academic merits], womanizing [implication: the common myth that black males are hyper-sexual predators] black man.” I am sorry if that sounds inflamatory, but that is how anyone else could read it. And it seems that if you were going to teach the chapter about one of the most shameful times in our history, the only thing you think is permissible to say about one of its main protagonists is that some accuse him of plagiarism and that he cheated on his wife. Fair enough. Then we could say that the only thing permissible to teach about our Founding Fathers is that they were Masonic slave owners, and the only thing we could teach about Charlemagne is that he was a lecher who had a harem of women and boys. Only saints need apply to be taught in history classes.
Maybe instead of griping about having to honor a man you seem to judge unworthy of veneration (last time I checked, laywomen have no business in judging officially whether someone is a saint anyway), maybe you can reflect on how, with all of the orthodox Roman Catholic saintly people running around in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it took a womanizing, plagiarizing heretic to stand up to a system where young boys would be hauled away and brutally lynched for looking at a white woman and old men could be called “boy” by men half their age. Heck, even some of these “orthodox” saintly Catholic people, and even clerics, were sinfully complicit in this, and no one said anything.
Say what you want about Dr. King (who also had a ton of honorary doctorates, if you didn’t know), but he didn’t win out because of his cause. He received death threats daily, his house was firebombed, his family went poor, he was accused of being a communist, and through it all, he turned the other cheek and fought peacefully. He knew that he was under constant threat of death, and that he could be assasinated at any minute. And he didn’t back down. In spite of everything, in spite of being of the true Faith, I can honestly say that I would be so fortunate to have such a crown on my head at the Last Judgement. “No greater love does a man hath than to lay down his life for his friends.” That’s the closest any non-Catholic can have to emulating a Christ-like death, and it is arguable, at least for me, that it is enough to give you a free pass straight into heaven.
I find your entire attitude very problematic. No one here wants to open a canonization process for Martin Luther King. And to venerate his memory, I don’t think we need to. I revere my grandmother as a saint, but I don’t think that she could ever stand up to the scrutiny of the investigation of Roman clerics. All I know is that she loved much, and loved much in suffering. If my mother tommorrow came to me and said that she might have done this or that wrong at one point, I will not judge my grandmother on what people tell me that she might of done or what she did in the shadows. I will judge her for what she did for me and for others in the open. If all you can do in terms of Martin Luther King is dig in his closet and drag out all of the gossip and dirty laundry, I find that profoundly disordered.
You refer to the Fathers of the Church. Well, let me refer you to the Fathers of the Desert, a subject near and dear to my heart:
Abba Pastor said, “Judge not him who is guilty of fornication, if you are chaste, or you will break the law like him. For He who said “do not commit fornication” said also “Do not judge”.”
A brother asked abba Poemen, “If I see my brother sin, is it right to say nothing about it?” The old man replied, “whenever we cover our brother’s sin, God will cover ours; whenever we tell people about our brother’s guilt, God will do the same about ours.”
Did Dr. King allegedly fall into adultery because he was a heretic, or a plagiarist, or both? Does that mean that he had courage to stand up to injustice because of this as well? I find this part of the discussion rather nauseating, and will leave it at that.
And I also find it bordering on fundamentalism to say that the only people we can want to emulate are the saints. Look, let me be frank, you are relatviely new to this rodeo and AG and I are not. We grew up with our favorite saints, and we both had pictures of them on our wall as teenagers. We both come from impeccable Catholic families, and we are fortunate enough to have had families who passed down to us their Catholic traditions. And we would hope to do the same with our children. But I have also always wanted to write like a Sylvia Plath or a Jorge Luis Borges. AG has always admired and has on her wall pictures of such figures as George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell since she is a big ballet fan. One of the holiest priests I have ever met, an SSPX priest, was also a big sports fan who had his favorite players. If the only people we can be enthusiastic about or want to emulate are the saints, I think that you are being a borderline Jansenist. The world is not that corrupt, and that has not been the historical Catholic ethos through the centuries. (You yourself cited Aristotle.)
And let’s face it, even a lot of saints wouldn’t have done what Martin Luther King did. Why could he do it? In spite of any other failings he may have had, he could do it because he had a love for Jesus Christ and the people that He redeemed in His blood: both the victims of oppression and their oppressors. For even he knew that the oppressor also suffers under the weight of his sin, and that is why he resisted them peacefully and did not hate them. It could have been very easy for him to advocate a more violent route such as the one advocated by Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. And many would say, due to the bloody history of injustice against blacks in the South, he would have been justified to have advocated such a route. But he did not. Even if this love for Jesus Christ is unacceptable to you since you would say that he is a heretic, in the end, it certainly did move mountains. And no one can doubt that kind of sincerity.
You’re certainly reading a lot into my writing, Arturo. “Emotionally violated?” What do my emotions have to do with anything? There’s no reference to them in my original post. As for this claim:
“And it seems that if you were going to teach the chapter about one of the most shameful times in our history, the only thing you think is permissible to say about one of its main protagonists is that some accuse him of plagiarism and that he cheated on his wife.”
Where does that come from? Of course a historical study of the Civil Rights Movement would include some discussion of King’s role in it. I only object to the way that he is held up as though his life was morally admirable on the whole.
It’s particularly ironic that both you and AG would interpret my criticisms of King as insults to the black community generally — something that would only make sense if King were somehow a shining example of the best that men generally (and perhaps African Americans specifically) can be, which is exactly what I deny.
To my mind, both you and AG are illustrating perfectly the very point I was making in my original post — that it is spiritually dangerous to take vicious people as moral exemplars. In this thread, you have taken the actions of a vicious man as being somehow representative of an entire community of people. You have, to varying degrees, defended actions you know to be immoral. (”It happens all the time” or “it was outweighed by other good deeds”.) You make unkind assumptions about me and Fr. Bailey in virtue of our pointing out perfectly true facts about King, which you say you find “offensive” and “nauseating”, and even stoop to one of my favorite tactics, the “you’re just a convert and so can’t understand how things are” approach.
None of this is responsive at all to my main point, which is a central part of Catholic moral philosophy. Virtue is not found in isolated deeds but in an entire way of life. That doesn’t mean that we can’t admire certain specific talents, or actions, or writings of non-virtuous people. But the attitude we typically adopt towards King is much more reminiscent of the way we would treat a saint. Singing songs to him, writing poems in his honor, asking that he be included as an “honorable person” in a Jubilee Mass, putting his image next to the Blessed Mother in stained glass windows of Catholic churches… this is inappropriate. It would be inappropriate for Sylvia Plath, or for sports stars (I’m also a sports fan, you know), or for ballet dancers, or for random American politicians, and it’s inappropriate for Martin Luther King. That is the point.
There’s a lot more I could say, but I have to leave now for a weekend trip. Please try to be civil in my absence.
Another triumph of Dr. King was the honor given him by Planned Parenthood of America in being given the Margaret Sanger Award on May 5, 1966.
Mrs. Coretta Scott King delivered her husband’s acceptance speech on his behalf. Here is just one interesting quote among many, written by the good Dr:
“At the turn of the century she (Margaret Sanger) went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.”
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/the-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr.htm
King died for a noble cause.