To My Catholic Brothers and Sisters with White Bodies

Five centuries ago, some people declared themselves to be superior by God’s design. Driven by hubris and greed, they interpreted their pale skin color to be the only affirmation needed. From this corrupt perspective, they consciously decided to exploit peoples of different hues for the economic gain of themselves and the crown they served. With these intentions, they constructed and institutionalized a flawed concept of race violating every aspect of loving God and neighbor.

They explored the globe assuming all to be for their domination with no regard for other peoples, cultures, and civilizations. They severed the intended connection between brain and heart, teaching bystanders to hold their tongues and turn a blind eye to grave injustices. Silence was their price for the privilege of having a white body.

As occupying forces, the modus operandi was violence through genocide, kidnapping, rape, destruction, displacement, and chattel slavery. Those who resisted the oppression by demanding their dignity be respected were maligned and murdered by the many for whom justice was not blind. Then, those who committed these heinous acts projected the worst of themselves onto the voiceless and oppressed.

All of this was done as the powers that be blatantly ignored any similarity between their behavior and that of the Roman forces that had occupied the homeland of Jesus of Nazareth, the one they professed to follow. Their actions were as cruel and depraved as those of the Romans towards the first Christians. Denying the dignity of their brothers and sisters with darker hues, they celebrated this newfound privilege that blasphemed the Gospel and the Mystical Body of Christ.

Those often excluded from the definition of whiteness, including, for example, Irish and Italian immigrants, strove to be accepted into the exclusive group. In time, their descendants benefitted from the expanding of the privileged definition. However, those with darker hues would continue to be treated as outsiders regardless of their time on this land.

The American church practiced the same apartheid institutionalized by law. By denying entry into worship, ordination, religious communities, and schools, by the practice of segregated parishes, and by making black people the last to receive the Holy Eucharist, the Church gravely desecrated the Mystical Body of Christ through the crucifixion of human dignity.

Four hundred years of dehumanization have resulted in deep chasms between the dehumanized and the dehumanizers. A litany of disparities along racialized lines reveals a glimpse at the depth of the systemic injustices. Addressing the divide must include acknowledging a painful and shameful history and present reality: a whitewashed history whose reality requires a courage unfamiliar to the privileged unless they first confront their discomfort.

Even artists commonly model their renderings of faith on idealized visions from western Europe. Creating images based on one’s own culture and experience is understandable to a degree. However, the abundance of dominantly acceptable images leads one to think that racist denial lies behind the dearth of images of the browner skin tones and Semitic features of many biblical figures.

Artists create too few images of Jesus the Nazarene appearing as a Palestinian man who lived two millennia ago. Doing otherwise would lead to questions about our faith, our beliefs, and ourselves. These are the questions that would threaten the lies supporting the silence.

More recent figures are treated in the same manner. Some images of Our Lady of Guadalupe are truly unrecognizable because of the extremely pale skin tones. Denying her brown skin is denying the significance of her encounters with Juan Diego, himself a man with brown skin.

Throughout our nation’s history, there have been men and women who have contributed to the unmasking of racism and white body supremacy in each generation. Pope Francis recognized four of them when he addressed the United States Congress during his apostolic journey to our land five years ago: Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Merton. For students of their work, it was apparent that the pope recalled these figures because of the common thread of human dignity for those systemically relegated to the margins.

In the Liturgy of the Mass, the faithful come together in their diversity to celebrate unity in faith – diversity that Paul tells us is beyond Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. In the truest sense, the unity includes and transcends the diversity. Certainly, today, we must expand the mentioned categories to include citizen, immigrant, or refugee; gender; and sexual orientation.  

Do we allow the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist to transform us? Are we really new creations in Christ? Do we move beyond the status quo of society to be Christ in the world? Are we willing to risk or relinquish our privilege for the Body of Christ?

The urgency of this moment calls the American church to move beyond institutionalized untruths and conditioned thinking to join us in affirming that Black lives matter. This moral statement, like the work of Day, King, Lincoln, and Merton, charts a new path for all of our children. It goes to the heart of the Incarnation, the Gospel of Christ, and Catholic Social Justice.

(This was written for and first published by Aquinas Emory Thinks, the blog of The Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University.)