I am a recovering Catholic, raised in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn. That makes me a BIC (Brooklyn Irish Catholic, distinct from a Baltimore Irish Catholic).
Each Sunday, we--the sons and daughters of firefighters, cops, carpenters, and electricians--dressed up and walked the streets in their Buster Browns and Mary Janes, the names of our shoes. We proceeded almost in unison for nine o'clock mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Church. We sat, stood, knelt to the memorized rhythm of the Catholic liturgy. We could do it with our eyes closed. Latin phrases triggered our response.
Most didn’t know what the phrases meant, but we altar boys (no girls allowed at the time) knew the English translation of the responsorial portions. A few kids held black leather-bound missals with a page marker of silk red ribbon. It was the missal of an adult, a gift of prestige. They followed the Latin phrases on the left-hand page with the English on the right.
If that wasn't enough Catholicism, my parents sent me to Catholic grammar school and Catholic high school, where I study religion every semester for a dozen years. Without much thought, I decided to attend Fairfield University, a Jesuit college in Connecticut for its engineering program affiliated with the University of Connecticut. (I dropped out of that program. I elected English, it being my second language after Brooklynese.)
I followed the routine religiously for some 13 years, even as I was rattled by doubt. (I didn't count the first six since that was my parents' responsibility.) I read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Hume, Merton, de Chardin, and the list goes on. By the time, I reached 20, Sunday mornings were for sleep, and God was for others. I no longer was Catholic. I joined the non-believers. I signed up as an atheist.
My Irish Catholic father wondered why he spent all that money on a Catholic education. My mother also fainted. She had so hoped me or one of my brothers or my sister would enter religious life. With my announcement, then there was none.
When I married my Catholic wife, I promised to raise our children Catholic. We did. Each Sunday, we attended mass as a newly married couple, new parents with a crying baby, parents with another crying baby and fidgeting older brother, and so on. I did not stop attending services for another quarter of a century. During that time, I listened to more than 2000 sermons given by more than a dozen different priests from a dozen different clerical backgrounds. Most bored me. That excludes the professors of theology and philosophy to whom I listened for five semesters.
Never, however, did I heard any religious affirm, justify, or rationalize racism. Not in the classroom, the hallways, the church, or from the pulpit. Not once.
I heard the opposite. I heard love all people in the Beatitudes. I imagined it when Jesus asked a lawyer what was the greatest commandment. He answered. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." He then asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story the Samaritan, whom the Jews did not regard as equals. With the final commandment: “Go and do likewise.” Jesus did not define our neighbors by their color, religion, or whatever. Then Jesus issued his final and most difficult commandment: “As I have loved you, love one another.”
That’s the Catholicism I heard and learned.
The institution is another matter. Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha created religions, not institutions. Their followers created institutions, and with their creations came the failings of their creators.
The self-righteousness and prejudice amongst Catholics, even their religious leaders, is legend: the destruction of Alexandria’s library, the four Crusades, the “convert-or-die” baptisms of indigenous people in North and South America, and the tacit endorsement of the indignities inflicted on African Americans by members of the Catholic community. The leaders of the Catholic Church in America and Rome failed to condemn this mortal of mortal sins. Too many participated in the sin of slavery and Jim Crow.
Why should the institution of Catholicism be so different than American institutions? The rhetoric of both portends to the protection of individual rights. Yet, American institutions always have failed African Americans. Slavery should have taught everyone a lesson. It didn’t. The failure of reconstruction provided another lesson missed. Race riots, more appropriately called massacres, came with lessons: New York City Riots of 1863, the Philadelphia riots of 1918, Greenwood (0K) riots of 1921, and Rosewood (FL) riots of 1923.[1]
Bigotry, prejudice, and hatred are not the trait of one group. They are humankind’s sin of hubris, our manifestation of Cain, and it has roiled our country for more than 246 years.
Hope blooms though. During the past 50 years, a miracle has begun to move across Western civilization. More people recognize what was cannot be what will be. They realize they must live up to the tenets of the religions that form, in part, the foundations of their societies. They must uphold the rules of liberty for all—equally.
The evolution is incomplete, but evolution is never complete. One change for the better leads to another change for the better. Our souls seek to rise above their current place to achieve a greatness without seeking the greatness in and of itself.
The trip has only just begun, and it will jar us for a long time to come.
[1] More African Americans died during these four events than those who have died in all the race riots of the past 50 years, I believe.
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