Are we all guilty?

Catholic 365 submission (books and culture section)

Do today’s Catholics share complicity in the Church’s failings?

By Mike Mastromatteo

As someone who has prepared a fair number of book reviews about the church and its more illustrious saints and sinners, I’m beginning to worry about the public perception of the Roman Catholic Church in North America.

The clerical abuse scandals of the early 1990s (and probably yet to be discovered earlier ones) certainly turned many lukewarm and semi-committed Catholics away from the Church. Progressives were quick to seize upon the scandals to bemoan authority structures in the Church, and to argue for an end to celibacy and the all-male priesthood.

More recently, the church’s involvement in the residential schools situation – especially in Canada – resulted in more scorn being heaped on the institutional church. The anger culminated in Canada at least, in the burning of more than 30 Catholic churches – most of them serving indigenous communities. To date, no one has been arrested for these acts of arson.

It’s disheartening, to say the least, to have the Church lumped in with other offending institutions and organizations as an agent of cultural “genocide” of indigenous populations.

Add to this an even more disturbing set of accusations. I recently reviewed two non-fiction books for different church media organizations that frankly left me disturbed, upset and fearful about the church’s very soul.

Although the two books told differing stories, they both stated as accepted fact that the Catholic Church – in the US particularly – is perhaps the largest bastion of racism and white supremacy the world over. I won’t mention the titles of the two books, but suffice to say, they were both well researched and documented, and the respective authors were sincere in their theses and conclusions.

The first book dealt with efforts by a diverse group of parishioners at an inner-city northeastern US parish to avoid shuttering, and to make their church a much more welcoming place. The author goes on to suggest this particular parish could be taken as a case study in how ordinary lay parishioners – albeit from all ethnicities, educational levels and socio-economic status – demonstrated that the laity deserve much more credit in helping redefine the nature and function of “church.”

It’s a fascinating argument in many ways. But in getting to the gist of it, the author had to cite age old accusations that US Catholic Church even indirectly, holds to a white supremacy attitude.

Considering the following comment from the book under discussion:

“The wounds for which the church and its members contend today are not abstract concepts – division, imperfection, and so on – but life-or-death situations, refractions of the legacy of colonial domination in many dehumanizing forms: white supremacy, forced migration, searing economic injustice, and institutional complicity in abuse, to name a few. If post-Vatican II ecclesiology is to reckon with these signs of the times, then the grief and anguish occasioned by these social wounds are worthy of careful consideration.”

Hot on the heels of that review, I had the opportunity to discuss a historical examination of the role of Black Catholic nuns in overcoming racism to create all-Black religious order of nuns, and in turn forcing the Church to examine its culpability in maintaining the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Church also stands accused of being the largest slave-holding institution of the 1800’s.

Again it’s a fascinating and relevant study especially in times of increasing social division and mistrust. And while I had no complaints about the author’s conclusions nor the validity of her historical research, I couldn’t shake off the author’s suggestion that all non-racialized Catholics in North America still have blood on their hands for anti-Black (and anti-Brown) acts of racism over the last nearly 500 years.

Again, consider the author’s blunt conclusions:

“Like Black Catholics’ widely overlooked history in the long African American fight for civil and human rights, the history of white Catholic racism as manifested in the 338 years of Church-sanctioned slavery in the land area that became the United States and more than 438 years of racial segregation and exclusion within Church boundaries remains largely unincorporated into the dominant narratives of the American and Catholic experiences.”

And in the second of the author’s one-two punch verdict, readers are told:

 “The Catholic Church was never an innocent bystander in the construction and propagation of white supremacy in the United States [and] Catholic practices of slavery and segregation were no less evil or brutal than any other forms of these institutions … the Roman Catholic Church became the first global institution to declare that Black and Brown lives did not matter.”

This is a difficult pill to swallow for Catholics who since day one of catechism classes are taught to respect and honor the Church and its ministers.

So where do we go from here?

We are told to make disciples of all nations. But how does that square with claims that evangelization and missionary work are forms of cultural genocide, or that the church itself is alleged to be first institution in history to proclaim that Black and Brown lives do not matter? How can anyone or anything do penance for these “sins?”

Indeed, where do we go from here?

As I am not a theologian, historian or canon lawyer, I can fall back only on the fact that despite its divine origins, the Church is a human institution and its failings and sins are those of corruptible man. This still does not discharge us of responsibility to examine our own conscience and consider how our thoughts and actions might be obstacles to true atonement and reconciliation.

As the author of the second book discussed above sternly warns: “Only when Black nuns and other Black people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, dared the Church to live up to its core principles of universal humanity and acknowledge (however grudgingly) that the lives and souls of Black people mattered did the white-dominated Church reveal its capacity for becoming truly Catholic. The same can be said for the nation at large.”

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