America's dark hour"One cannot pretend to defend the sacredness of every human life and tolerate any kind of racism." This was the clear message Pope Francis sent to Catholics in the United States at the beginning of June, when he said: "We are not going to be the only ones who are not able to do the same. "great concern" by the "painful" social unrest that is occurring in the United States after the death of George Floyd, reported Elisabetta Piqué in the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
"At the same time, we must recognize that the violence of the last few nights is self-destructive and self-harming. Nothing is gained by violence and much is lost." added the Holy Father, citing the words of the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Argentine journalist added. Archbishop Jose Gomez had also said in a letter, among other things: "Racism has been tolerated for too long [...]. We must get to the root of the racial injustice that still infects many areas of American society."
The Pope added: "Today, I join with the Church of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and across the United States, in praying for the repose of the soul of George Floyd and all those who have lost their lives because of the sin of racism." "We pray for comfort for families and friends burdened by grief and pray for the national reconciliation and peace we long for." he added, finally asking Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of America, to intercede for all those who work for peace and justice in the United States and the world.
Media correspondents at the Holy See picked up on the Pope's words. Spain's Eva Fernandez, for example, correspondent of the COPE network, and Juan Vicente Boo, of ABC, stressed on the web Tweetr the Pope's appeal: "We cannot close our eyes to racism.".
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, recalled on the day of George Floyd's farewell in his hometown of Houston, that in the United States, when it comes to addressing the issue of racism, one has "a beam in the eye". It is about "a difficult but necessary reality to face", said the purpurate. "We cannot solve a problem until we acknowledge it. This includes us as members of the Catholic Church".
Protesters and riots
Floyd's death, seen in slow motion on social media, caused an uproar and prompted thousands of protesters to take to the streets to express their outrage. The sometimes violent protests exposed issues of race riots, common in the United States, from economic inequality to injustice and prejudice within diverse communities.
African-American Floyd alerted the officers who killed him about 20 times that he could not breathe, according to a police transcript released to the public. Until recently, Floyd's last minutes of life were known thanks to videos recorded by bystanders, but one of the latest documents shows the scene in an even more dramatic way. "They're going to kill me, they're going to kill me." Floyd, 46, said as police officers had him pinned down and face down on the ground, to which police officer Chauvin responded: "Stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a lot of oxygen to talk."
All the officers involved were dismissed from the police and subsequently charged.
Reflection
The brutal murder of George Floyd and the note from several U.S. bishops, who have expressed their feelings about the "shattered, disgusted and outraged to see yet another video of an African-American man murdered before our very eyes." has caused Catholic communities to reflect once again. The magazine AngelusThe Diocese of Los Angeles, for example, has interviewed several Catholics, mostly black, who share their experiences (see angelusnews.com).
One day in early June, Sophia Martinson recounts, John Thordarson posted a short video that he had finally finished. "It took me a long time to make in this video." he says. "With everything that's been going on, I feel like it's important to say something, but I wasn't really sure what that something was."
My parents looked at each other as people
"That something" Thordarson was trying to express was a response to the death of George Floyd. After half a dozen attempts to write a script, Thordarson adds: "I realize that what's really important right now is that we have conversations." To begin that conversation, he decided to start by sharing the story of his parents, an African American woman and an Irish American man who fell in love and married during a time of segregation.
Thordarson's video, told through photographs and his own narration, does not directly address what happened to George Floyd. Rather, it highlights a relationship in which love triumphed over a prejudiced environment.. "The reason my parents got married is because they didn't look at each other like they were supposed to be, they just looked at each other as people.".
For Paul Thordarson, John's father, this moment of encounter is especially important for Catholics, who are called to spread hope and joy. "Faith is not a lot of negative things, but rather living the Christian life, a life of love.". Amid the turmoil over Floyd's death, notes Sophia Martinson, these words point to a message of healing that the Catholic Church can offer to its faithful, and to the rest of the world. However, in the age of social networking and the so-called "cancellation culture". (when you're even being vacuumed in the networks and you're "cancel"), what real-life problems is this message supposed to address and what kind of action does it lead to?
Catholic, pro-life and black
Gloria Purvis can barely watch the video of Floyd's arrest. "It's a trauma, and I wish I'd almost never seen it.". As a Catholic, pro-life activist, and black woman, Purvis, a presenter at "Morning Glory" on EWTN, he felt Floyd's tragedy affected him deeply, says Sophia Martinson. At a June 5 panel discussion hosted by Georgetown University, Purvis compared the experience of watching the video to "see an abortion".
Since then, Purvis has faced another source of shock and pain: the sense of disconnection from many fellow Catholics. "It's been disconcerting."he said, "because of the shock..., and the sense of betrayal, when you see prominent white Catholics who claim to be pro-life, saying and doing everything they can to avoid addressing the problem of police brutality and racism, as it affects the black community".
Gloria is not alone in feeling this way. "I hear this same feeling in many Catholics of color: blacks, Mexicans, my Latino brothers and sisters. I hear the Pan-African diaspora of Catholics who feel betrayed." One source of division could be politics, Martinson says.
Abortion and racism: culture of death
The journalist delves deeper into the issue, and talks to Louis Brown, executive director of Christ Medicus (a nonprofit medical organization), who believes the two issues are not mutually exclusive. Brown, a Michigan attorney who previously worked as an advisor to several congressmen, described the push to support both anti-abortion and anti-racism causes as a "false choice".
"Both abortion and racism are part of the culture of death.". In his opinion, "The right to life, beginning with the unborn, is the preeminent social problem of our time because of its gravity. But fighting racism is a consequence of fighting to promote the right to life".
Brown's words echo those found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the condemnation of racism as one of the forms of discrimination that "must be curbed and eradicated, for they are incompatible with God's design."
Some have pointed out that Catholics have not always practiced what the Church preaches about racism.
Nor is it any secret, adds Sophia Martinson, that racism has been an unfortunate reality in Catholic seminaries in the United States. While studying at the Conception Seminary College in the 1960s, now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recalled the racial prejudice that regularly plagued him, including a white seminarian's hurtful comment after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot: "Well, I hope he dies." Such racial hatred led Thomas to leave the seminary and, for a period of time, he left Catholicism altogether.
Councils of Black Catholics
Father Matthew Hawkins spent twenty years working in community economic development and taught at the University of Pittsburgh. On June 27, he was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Pittsburgh at the age of 63, having converted from Protestantism in his youth.
The first remedy that comes to the mind of the former social worker to cure racism is this: "I believe that as Catholics we are obliged to approach these kinds of controversies with wisdom." said to Angelus. This "means that what should really inspire our action is to enter into a life of prayer, and a kind of prayer that increases empathy.".
Father Hawkins believes that prayer is crucial because it helps us to feel accompanied in suffering. He personally encourages his parishioners to pray the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross. In doing so, he says, "you are entering into the passion of Christ and identifying with the suffering of all humanity, which creates a sense of solidarity in human suffering.".
At the end of John Thordarson's video, he himself recalls how someone once asked his mother: "Why did you want to marry a white man?"and she responded: "I didn't want to marry a white man. I wanted to marry Paul."
His words reflect, in Martinson's view, the heart of the Church's response to racism: to see a person as an image of God, not as a composite of external characteristics. As several black Catholics have emphasized, that response begins within, with the habit of sincere prayer and self-reflection.
America's dark hour
