Foot-washer

  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, OS...

  “In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.”        ~ Anne Braden (1924-2006), Louisville racial justice activist   Anne Braden was a local white advocate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.  She and her husband Carl are most famous for purchasing a house in the then exclusively white neighborhood of Shively for a Black couple.  Both Bradens were arrested as “Communists’ for their act and the house was dynamited after irate neighbors shot it up and burned a cross in the front yard. Anne was not deterred and continued the fight for the remaining fifty years of her life, founding a newspaper and several antiracist organizations.      Anne provides an exce...

    I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon          --The Song of Songs, 1:5 (trans. from the Greek LXX)   The early Church Fathers believed that the Song of Songs in the Old Testament was a love poem composed by King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (today’s Ethiopia), who was a beautiful woman with black skin. In their allegorical vision, this couple symbolized Jesus and the Church.     As Fr. Cyprian Davis writes,  “Solomon is a type of Christ, and just as the queen of Sheba came to Solomon to consult him because he was wise, so the Church comes to Christ who is Wisdom himself.  As a result, since the queen of Sheba is black, so must the church be black and beautiful.  Her very blackness is a symbol of her universality; all nations are present in her.”    In America, having black skin carries a heavy burden.  Black m...

  The great Catholic Church … is the only place on this Continent where rich and poor, white and black, must drop prejudice at the threshold and go hand in hand to the altar. The Catholic Church alone can break the color line. There could be no greater factor in solving the race problem than that matchless institution whose history for 1900 years is but a continual triumph  over all assailants.     --Daniel Rudd, Black Catholic journalist from Bardstown, Kentucky [consolidated quotes from his newspaper the  American Catholic Tribune ]   One of the beautiful things about being Catholic is our church transcends the divisions of country, nation, and race.  Even on the small scale of our archdiocese, we have members who are rural and urban, English speaking and Spanish.  It comprises those born here and born afar, including priests and religious from India and Africa and Asia.  This Church is a model of a new country, a new society...

  Why should I feel discouraged / Why should the shadows come / Why should my heart feel lonely / And long for heaven and home / When Jesus is my portion / A constant friend is He / His eye is on the sparrow / And I know He watches over me / I sing because I'm happy / I sing because I'm free / His eye is on the sparrow / And I know He watches me “His Eye is On the Sparrow,”  Civilla D. Martin and Charles H. Gabriel    For several years I was a parishioner at a predominately Black Catholic parish in Oklahoma.  Of the many things I loved about this community, the gorgeous music sung by the Gospel choir every Sunday stood out.  They sang a range of songs from Negro spirituals to contemporary hymns more familiar in predominately white parishes.  My favorite is the hymn above, “His Eye is On the Sparrow.”    The house sparrow is one of the most common animals in the world—so familiar and so small that it is easy to ignore. ...