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In light of the recent dust storm concerning the topic of racism, I’ve been doing some thinking. Why don’t we Catholics make a bit more of our non-racist credentials?
Of course the liberal media has tried to stick the Church with all kinds of “isms” in modern times, and in most of the time establishing the real truth is rather complicated. For example, the claim that the Church is inherently sexist (by which they really mean “misogynist”) is untrue. The Magisterium certainly has never taught that women are morally inferior to men. But, the war of the sexes having raged relentlessly for time out of mind, it no doubt is true that, practically speaking, women have sometimes gotten the worse end of it, in Christian societies as in others. Furthermore, establishing what the relations between the sexes should be is itself a bear of a question. The end result is that we’re not likely to hear the end of that charge anytime soon. Moving on to another sore point: the claim that the Church is “homophobic” is true in a way, since she has always unambiguously condemned sodomy as sinful. In this case, the trick is not establishing what the Church thinks; rather, one must argue that no injustice is being done here because, in fact, the Church is right. With some people, as we know, that’s a tough sell.
But we don’t often hear about the Church being racist. That’s not surprising, because it would be a fairly ridiculous charge. Find me an organization that’s more multi-ethnic than the Catholic Church. Find one that’s opened its doors to the people of every nation for more centuries. No doubt particular racist individuals have on occasion used official Church positions to promote their pernicious ideas, but if anything remotely resembling Magisterial endorsement has ever been given to such claims, I’ve yet to hear about it. And that’s the sort of thing you would hear about.
In my experience, liberals often like to tell the history of modernity as a story of the gradual shedding of evil prejudices. From a past filled with bigotry, and with hateful and judgmental people, we have moved forward to a future where everyone is respected and valued. (Well, everyone except the unborn, the terminally ill, and a few other inconvenient people, but we’ll leave that aside for now.) But you know, if that’s the story, shouldn’t they be a little bit more embarrassed about the well-documented, virulent racism of so many of the “founding fathers” of the modern era? The only modern philosopher who I ever hear accused is Nietzsche, who, as the bad boy of the early modern era, can be criticized pretty freely. Actually that’s ironic because I’m much less sure of Nietzsche’s racism (it’s always hard to know how seriously to take him) than I am of Kant’s or Hume’s. And of course, ALL the important thinkers of the early modern era were white males of basically European stock.
By contrast, our important thinkers span a much wider range of backgrounds. (North Africa, anyone?) And find me the racist statements of St. Thomas or St. Augustine (who, if he had been deposited in the American South in 1950, would likely have been pushed to the back of the bus). This seems to be a serious flaw in the classic “modern story.” It’s not a sophisticated attack, but it’s the sort that will bother and confuse the more ordinary liberal. Perhaps we should do more with this.
In our short-term history, though, the Church’s non-racist credentials (at least in the American South) are less than spotless. Many were the black Catholics forced to stand during mass in the few Catholic churches they could even get into. A certain black Catholic from Louisiana has blogged about this:
“…my grandparents lived in a place and time where they had to pay to attend Mass and then were usually not allowed to sit. Other black Catholics in this time period were not allowed to even stay to the end of Mass, so as to avoid any contact with the white congregation. Many black Catholics in southern Louisiana actually had no place to attend Mass, as they were banned from the white churches.”
But Matt, remember that this is not the position of the Church, but of individuals in the Church. As I read her post, Clara is not saying there are not or have not been racists in the Church, but that the Church herself is not racist.
Historically, the American Hierarchy has been and in some circumstances continues to be extremely racist, and not only toward African Americans. The hatred toward Southern and Eastern European Catholics by their fellow Catholics from Cardinal Archbishops on down to the child in the pew surpassed even that shown toward the blacks. Even today those that continue in their traditional ethnic religious practices are looked down on by the Irish and German influenced power brokers in the “American Church.” It is the people from or of Eastern or Southern European descent who are the most faithful to Tradition, the Magesterium, and the Holy Father, hardly viewed as virtues by the “American Church.”
Thank you, Father, I stand corrected. I’m not sure that secular liberals are going to be as apt as I am, though, to understand the difference between the Church and her members, especially Cardinal Archbishops!
“Why don’t we Catholics make a bit more of our non-racist credentials?”
I think you’ve answered your own question here:
“But we don’t often hear about the Church being racist.”
It’s a non-issue. No one can credibly accuse the Church of being racist. So why do we even need to bring it up? What’s so crucial about this in our time? Are we in competition with other racist religions or organizations? The Muslims aren’t racist either. Neither are the Mormons any longer. As for the Jews, well, let’s not even go there. I just don’t see the point.
Heh heh. I did finish that post rather hastily (I had an appointment to get to, and I like to put something up right at the start of the week, whenever possible), so perhaps the point was not completely clear.
Champions of modernism like to tell their story as a tale of triumph over the narrow-minded bigotry of the Middle Ages and before. The underlying theme is the “discovery” of that truly great value, individual autonomy, and of the respect for persons that is a natural corollary of prizing individual autonomy as a universal good. Before the discovery of autonomy/respect (the story goes) people were judged on a variety of grounds, many of them foolish and bigoted, stemming from characteristics that people themselves had not chosen could in no way change. Modern history is a tale of the gradual shedding of those prejudices. We’ve made good progress with sex and ethnicity, and now we’re working on things like class prejudice and “sexual orientation” prejudices.
This little fairy tale may seem to you too silly to bother about, but it’s awfully potent in the minds of run-of-the-mill liberals (say). For anyone who believes it, it seems a discrepancy worth worrying about that some of the “founding fathers” of this era (Kant, for example, who can take more credit than anyone for our ideas about autonomy and respect) were shockingly bigoted themselves, while the great minds of the Catholic ranks never were.
Actually, the prejudice Matt K speaks of is new to me. I’ve haven’t witnessed such things myself. Yet the blame cannot be attributed to the Church, or the clergy. What comes to my mind is the missionary orders, a few of them predominately Irish, that sent countless priests and nuns to bring the Gospel to the blacks of Africa. When their members had spent the best years of their lives in heroically evangelizing and could no longer endure the hardships of climate and terrain, they were sent to work in the deep south. In cities like Boston almost every Irish family had at least one member of the family enter the religious life. What to do with so many vocations in the North? Send them to the South.
Clara, we Catholics don’t make muc