Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (review)

Summary Review

In this compelling and provocative study, theologian Bryan Massingale exhorts the Catholic community in the United States to examine its fundamental understandings of and commitment to racial justice. The author notes that this book “grows out of a struggle that is both personal and professional: the integration of my experiences as an African American and my Catholic faith” (ix). He states as his dual purpose “to develop a Catholic approach to racial justice more adequate to a nation, church, and world of increasing diversity and to demonstrate how a serious reckoning with the African American experience would enable Catholic social ethics to address some of its deficits and lacunae” (x). In this volume Massingale has integrated established scholarship from diverse intellectual disciplines with his own reflections to create a skillful work of synthesis.

The author first discusses racism, differentiating a “commonsense” understanding of the term limited to individual, intentional, negative acts or behaviors perpetrated against individuals who are racially different from the more insidious and systemic culture of racism animating American society. Multiple cultures co-exist within societies, each one providing for particular groups of people “. . . a soul, a set of meanings and values that is an individual’s and a social group’s identity” (18). The author defines the soul—or at least a constitutive part—of African American culture as “the struggle to be recognized and accepted as human in a racist society”; that of white culture, as “the presumption of dominance and measure of normativity” (24) [emphasis his].

The author contends that the preservation of systemic white privilege fuels contemporary opposition to racial equality, even as many white people claim to endorse theoretical equal opportunity. He assures white Americans distressed by their skin color advantage that he considers them neither bad nor prejudiced individuals; however, the involuntary nature of their social advantage makes it no less real for them—nor less damaging for peoples of color. The enduring disadvantages dealt his father’s employment prospects and his family’s economic status because labor unions practiced racially exclusionary policies illustrate this latter fact effectively.

The author contextualizes his discussion of Catholic social teaching on racism with three “historical markers that illustrate the importance of this topic and some recurring dynamics in the Catholic approach to racial injustice” (44). The growing racial and ethnic diversity or “browning” of the American Catholic community finds little reflection in church leadership, tolerance for multicultural worship styles, or welcome for people of color in “white” parishes. Pope John Paul’s 1999 exhortation to American Catholics to eradicate racism met with the Catholic cable network EWTN’s assertion that “racism is no longer a pressing social issue in the United States” (46). His third marker, the controversy over the Federated Colored Catholics in the 1930s, recounts the fate of this black Catholic lay organization’s bold assertion of its Catholic identity and condemnation of the Church’s policies of racial exclusion. The contest for organizational leadership and control between the black Catholic scholar and activist, Thomas Wyatt Turner, and the liberal Father John LaFarge, SJ, illustrates a recurring theme of black and white interaction: white suppression of black leadership and initiative in favor of white paternalism and control of interracial issues.

The author restricts his analysis of Catholic social teaching on racism to examining pastoral letters issued by the U.S. hierarchy since 1959. Although he acknowledges that since 2000 three prelates have written knowledgeably about the systemic nature of racism, he concludes that most prelates ignore the issue entirely or still consider it a problem of individual interactions. Among the “deficits and lacunae” of Catholic social teaching on racism, he cites such omissions as black input and agency, social analysis, ethical reflection, plans of implementation, and most significantly, passion. In comparison to the Church’s passionate stand against abortion, for example, the author contends, “If ‘passion’ connotes commitment, involvement, and fervor, the Catholic stance on racism, in contrast, can be characterized as tepid, lukewarm, and half...