Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (review)

Massingale begins by asking, "Does Catholic faith have any relevance for the struggle for racial justice and equality in twenty-first century America?" (x). ¹ Addressing this question his aims are to develop a more adequate Catholic approach to racial justice, and "to demonstrate how a serious reckoning with the African-American experience would enable Catholic social ethics to address some if its deficits and lacunae" (x).

Drawing upon Bernard Lonergan, Massingale defines racism as a culture, which unveils how it is a matrix of meaning within which human beings in a society are socialized. The power of this starting point reveals the extent to which this culture (de)forms the unconscious and taken-for-granted way contemporary racism, "advocates interpersonal decency, kindness, and respect for all while it yet protects white systemic advantage and benefit" (42).

Massingale explains that racist cultural meanings are tacitly transmitted (28). Massingale demonstrates this tacit transmission in job employment. Studies show that employers want "to do the right thing" but will rely on gut reactions when hiring. Research finds that employers will ask black applicants if they have a criminal background, which "suggests that there are some automatic associations between race and criminality" that are not made in regard to white candidates (29). This form of "common sense" makes contemporary legal debates that require conscious or intentional motivation of racial harm appear to disregard the complex reality of living in a racist culture.

Massingale interrogates United States Catholic social teaching and finds that, unlike other documents on social issues, works addressing racism do not use current social science to engage in in-depth investigation of the concrete reality they discuss. Massingale's analysis reveals a picture of United States Catholic teaching to be "superficial in its social analysis of racism, naïve in its reliance upon rational persuasion, and blind to how the church's complicity in and bondage to a racialized culture compromises its teaching and identity" (78).

At the core of this critique is Massingale's connection of white culture and the Catholic Church in the United States. Addressing the "radical evil" of racism necessitates a radical response, one that contends with the Catholic Church as a "white institution." What makes the euro-centric approach to American Catholicism "white" is in its cultural expression assumed as normative, universal, and that which is really "Catholic."

Massingale offers a theo-ethical vision of racial reconciliation in the United States involving truth-telling and affirmative redress. Massingale argues that without intentional, proactive conscious efforts, "Without a firm commitment to concrete action to right past and present wrong and make whole those who have been harmed, verbal apologies or statements of regret over racial injustices are empty rhetoric, if not worse" (102).

The text is both intellectually challenging and academically accessible. This text deserves a wide readership. To engage these ideas necessitates not only conceptual understanding. Massingale's writing is an invitation to face our locus, our everyday practice -our culture that reinscribes the whiteness of Catholicism in America. Implicitly the book is challenging white theologians to "a new disposition, a new theological habitus." ²