For several years, I have had a robust sense of pride in the American Catholic Church’s ability to maintain unity throughout our history. Protestants may splinter … and splinter … and splinter again an unending cycle of division. Not the Catholic Church. Even in the period leading to the Civil War—a conflict that pitted brother against brother and led so many other denominations to split into north and south (like the Southern Baptists)—we remained one, holy, catholic and apostolic. This emphasis on unity has been immensely reassuring to me when considering the culture wars and other challenges of our day.
Yet, this summer my perspective was challenged and my pride punctured by two books: Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, by Fr. Brian Massingale, SJ and The History of Black Catholics in America by Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB. To summarize—or perhaps grossly simplify in a short space, white American Catholics were united (north and south) in the antebellum period by opposition to the abolition of slavery. The white hierarchy and laity both broadly accepted if not actively supported the institution of slavery, and a belief in the inferiority of Black Americans. Many white Catholic Southerners, including clergy and members of religious orders, were slave holders who wished to maintain their property—despite the fact of their slaves being Catholic themselves. White Catholic Northerners often did not wish to see freed Blacks compete with immigrants (Irish in particular) for scarce jobs, again, even if those free Blacks were Catholic.
I write this as a son of the frontier Catholic Holy Land of Kentucky. My relatives were among those English exiles who fled to Maryland then Bardstown. I count among my ancestors Bishop Martin John Spalding (my first cousin, seven generations back), who was born in central Kentucky before becoming the bishop of Louisville then Baltimore. He was a slaveholder who bitterly opposed abolition, writing about the Emancipation Proclamation:
While our brethren are thus slaughtered in hecatombs, Ab. Lincoln cooly issues his Emancipation Proclamation, letting loose from three to four millions of half- civilized Africans to murder their Masters & Mistresses! And all this under the pretense of philanthropy!
It was left to many of those “schismatic Protestants” to lead the abolitionist movement in the name of Christ.
Catholics have done an exceptional job working for social justice at other points in our history. Christ’s radical message about the dignity of every human being transformed our world and continues to do so. We should not be complacent or quiet about our role in that struggle or expect that being members of the Church makes us immune to grave social evils. Unity and uniformity can be sinful if maintained at the price of silence and inaction in the face of grave injustice. We are also called to holiness, which in our day means taking a prophetic stand against racism and a hard, honest look at our own history. The Good News is that God is with us in our struggle, and that he has broken down the dividing wall of every human division, uniting us all into Himself.
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