What Can Catholics Add to the Conversation on Race?

On Friday, I explored the question, “How Big of a Race Problem Do We Have, Exactly?” Short answer: while there isn’t a clear racial disparity in fatal police shootings, there are racial disparities in other areas (including the use of non-lethal force by the police), and there is a growing unease within the black community in the U.S. Both the unease and the underlying disparities need addressing, and I’m concerned that we’re getting sidetracked into unproductive debates over how racist America is, instead. Over the last two weeks, I’ve also spoken to priests who would like to say something, but don’t really know what to say. They’re rightly afraid of saying or doing anything that seems too partisan, but also know they need to be at the forefront of the legitimate fight for social justice. So with all of that in mind, I would like to offer four things that I think the Catholic Church is uniquely qualified to share at this moment:

(1) A better framework to address racism.

Looking at questions of race relations on a purely political level, it’s difficult for it not to devolve into a power grab, with each side trying to get more power for their own racial or political group. Politics seems to thrive on dividing and conquering, and the last few decades of American politics have certainly not shown political solutions to be great at unifying us. But while there are definitely political and policy implications to the national conversation we’re having, there’s a better way we could be approaching it.

Before it’s a political issue, racism is first and foremost a spiritual one. It’s a failure to recognize our common brotherhood as sons of Adam and as creatures made in the image of God. This is the foundation of all of our dignity. Racism is wrong for the exact same reason that abortion is wrong – that there are certain things that you should never do to another human being, and that includes anything that violates their human dignity.

2304 Respect for and development of human life require peace. Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries. Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication among men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity. Peace is “the tranquillity of order.” Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.

In other words, achieving “peace” doesn’t just mean the cessation of riots or looting. It means the healing of the wounds that are giving rise to protests, rioting, and looting. And this spiritual problem requires a spiritual solution:

2305 Earthly peace is the image and fruit of the peace of Christ, the messianic “Prince of Peace.” By the blood of his Cross, “in his own person he killed the hostility,” he reconciled men with God and made his Church the sacrament of the unity of the human race and of its union with God. “He is our peace.” He has declared: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

It’s in the Cross that we are ultimately united, where we can finally say that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). But this reality isn’t meant to be just something for the hereafter. Our world should increasingly reflect this heavenly reality. The more Christians (of all colors) recognize this reality, the more we’re on the same team, and can stand shoulder-to-shoulder in strategizing about solutions. The U.S. bishops put this very powerfully, back in 1958:

There are many facets to the problems raised by the quest for racial justice. There are issues of law, or history, of economics, and of sociology. There are questions of procedure and technique. There are conflicts in culture. Volumes have been written on each of these phases. Their importance we do not deny. But the time has come, in our considered and prayerful judgment, to cut through the maze of secondary or less essential issues and to come to the heart of the problem.

The heart of the race question is moral and religious. It concerns the rights of man and our attitude toward our fellow man. If our attitude is governed by the great Christian law of love of neighbor and respect for his rights, then we can work out harmoniously the techniques for making legal, educational, economic, and social adjustments. But if our hearts are poisoned by hatred, or even by indifference toward the welfare and rights of our fellow men, then our nation faces a grace internal crisis.

(2) An Outsider’s Perspective.

One of the debates raging within the broader debate is how much racism is even still a problem. As a global Church, present in every country on earth, the Catholic Church has the benefit of always having both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. That’s important because there are some details we don’t know unless we’re living them, but there are also times where we’re too close to a situation to look at it objectively. So it may be worthwhile to consider Pope Francis’ take:

Dear brothers and sisters in the United States, I have witnessed with great concern the disturbing social unrest in your nation in these past days, following the tragic death of Mr George Floyd.

My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life. At the same time, we have to recognize that “the violence of recent nights is self-destructive and self-defeating. Nothing is gained by violence and so much is lost”.

Today I join the Church in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and in the entire United States, in praying for the repose of the soul of George Floyd and of all those others who have lost their lives as a result of the sin of racism. Let us pray for the consolation of their grieving families and friends and let us implore the national reconciliation and peace for which we yearn. May Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of America, intercede for all those who work for peace and justice in your land and throughout the world.

May God bless all of you and your families.

I get that Pope Francis isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and so perhaps Pope John Paul II’s words (during his visit to St. Louis in 1999) will carry more weight. In the context of the pro-life movement and the need for a new evangelization, he said:

As the new millennium approaches, there remains another great challenge facing this community of St. Louis, east and west of the Mississippi, and not St. Louis alone, but the whole country: to put an end to every form of racism, a plague which your Bishops have called one of the most persistent and destructive evils of the nation.

But that’s not just the “view from outside.” As both popes acknowledge in their statements, this is also the view of the American bishops. The problem of racism isn’t merely a historical one, but something we’re still struggling with, in all of the areas that the U.S. bishops highlighted back in 1958. Now, are any of these views infallible? No. But they’re worth listening to anyways. Things are undeniably better than they used to be, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the racial wounds we’ve faced (and inflicted) as Americans are therefore entirely healed.

(3) A Better Way of Thinking About Institutional Sin

Another area that the Church can help the conversation is with a better vocabulary: concepts like “structures of sin” and “social sin.” What does it look like for an institution to be corrupt, rather than (just) an individual. But it’s not just from her theorizing that we know what this looks like, of course. It’s also from the institutional corruption we’ve seen within the Church, particularly in the initial response to the abuse crisis.

The sex abuse crisis in the Church was really two or three separate, related scandals. The first was the sexual abuse of children by priests. The second was sexual relations with adults (both men and women) by priests, some of whom were under their care, and none of whom allegedly-celibate priests should have been involved with in this way. The third was the episcopal or institutional response: covering up crimes (and sins), putting the image of the institution over doing the right thing. Addressing this meant more than just determining how many priests were actually abusers or sexually-active. It also meant looking at how we respond to those “bad apples.”

Something similar is the case here. There are frustrations over racism, but also over police brutality and excessive use of force, and also over the institutional response. Derek Chauvin, the officer whose knee was on George Floyd’s neck as he died, had a long history of complaints against him, and seems to have had a reputation for excessive force within the police department and the nightclub where he worked security (sometimes alongside George Floyd, curiously). Yet he was still working as a police officer at the critical moment. That points to an institutional problem.

Back in 2000, Fr. Paul Shaughnessy compared institutional corruption in the Church to a corrupt police department:

If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled.

However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members who subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don’t usually mean that every policeman is on the take—perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes. Rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently if reform is to take place, an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.

The analogy works the other way around, too. No matter what steps police departments take, they can’t promise that there will never be another cop who abuses his authority. And so the question then becomes: what happens when there are bad apples? The focus can’t just be on individual officers: it also needs to be on the organizational health and culture of police departments. Do officers and institutions “protect their own,” or seek the common good?

There are certain similarities between priests and law enforcement officers: both go through extensive training that consciously builds up a strong spirit of fraternal solidarity, both are often hated by the public, and both are (by and large) focused on the well-being of those that they serve, although both attract individuals who may be power-hungry or corrupt. This results in largely the same set of temptations: to view outside critics as the enemies, and to resist even legitimate criticisms (or self-policing) for fear that admitting fault will harm the honor of the fraternity or the institution.

If we want to have a serious conversation about how we can do better, we can’t just talk about how many cops are “bad apples,” but also about how those “bad apples” are handled by police departments. Already, some concrete solutions are being proposed: reconsidering qualified immunity (a legal doctrine making it difficult to sue police officers in their individual capacity for violating constitutional rights) and focusing on the role of police unions in protecting bad cops.

Having said that, sometimes institutions prove beyond repair. In Denver in 1994, Cardinal Stafford concluded that it was fruitless trying to reform his seminary – the institutional opposition was too great, and the structural impediments to reform were daunting. So he and his successor, Archbishop Chaput, closed the seminary and then opened a new and improved one, five years later. That didn’t mean that they just stopped forming priests for five years – they just weren’t doing it locally for a while. Likewise, the New York Times reported this morning that a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis’ city council has voted to disband the police department, concluding that it is systemically corrupt in a way that cannot be reformed. Much of the news coverage has made it sound like Minneapolis voted for pure anarchy, but they actually seem to be following the model of Camden, New Jersey, which did the same thing, shifting policing authority from the municipality to the county level for a while, and decreasing overall police presence. That experiment was connected to a large decline in crime, with the murder rate falling to its lowest level since 1987 (from 67 homicides in 2012 to 22 in 2017). Will the Minneapolis experiment work? It’s too soon to say. But looking at our experiences with institutional reform gives us a framework by which to approach the question, and to consider some of the challenges coming their way.

But there’s one final thing that we can’t ignore when we talk about institutional corruption, or systemic racism, or anything at the level at the systems or institutions. Too often, we use that kind of talk in a way that personifies institutions, and absolves the responsible individuals. Pope John Paul II, while acknowledging the reality of social sin, cautioned:

Whenever the church speaks of situations of sin or when the condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.

(4) Learning to Despoil the Egyptians.

One of the tragic consequences of viewing racial questions in purely-political terms is that we tend to immediately side with “our” side, without listening to or trusting the “other” side. Already, I’ve heard several conservatives suggest that this isn’t really about George Floyd’s death, or race, or anything of the sort, but is just an excuse by the radical left to pursue its aims. It’s definitely true that the radical left is trying to use this movement for its own ends, but that shouldn’t stop us from asking: what legitimate grievances are they responding to?

In 1203, St. Dominic was travelling through southern France, which was a hotbed of the Albigensian heresy. What he witnessed was that people were attracted to the Albigensians, because they lived lives of simplicity, and they were powerful preachers, whereas both the lifestyle and the preaching of the Catholic priests were often questionable. And so what did Dominic do? He formed the Order of Preachers, who were mendicants (meaning that they begged for their food and basic needs), and who were focused on the art of good preaching. He recognized the legitimate needs of the people, and then offered them a better response than Albigensianism.

In 1891, when socialism was spreading across Europe and America, Pope Leo XIII responded with Rerum Novarum, which both condemned socialism and condemned the working conditions and poor wages that made socialism so popular, and declaring that “some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” Socialism was the wrong answer, but it was addressing a real problem. So we should be asking: what are the legitimate grievances that people are raising today? If you can’t come up with any, there’s a good chance you’re not listening, or that your heart isn’t open to hearing the truth from an inconvenient place.

In 1210, around the time of St. Dominic, the bishop of Paris condemned the writings of Aristotle on natural philosophy. Why? Because Aristotle, a pagan, held some erroneous views on things like the creation of the world. The bishop just threw out the baby with the bathwater. A few decades later, St. Thomas Aquinas, a true Dominican, took a better approach, using all that is good within Aristotle to better explain the Catholic faith. In so doing, he was following the lead of St. Augustine, who, back in 397, explained that “if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.” Augustine described this as “despoiling the Egyptians,” referring to Exodus 12:33-36, where the Israelites took gold and silver from the Egyptians with them on the Exodus. What might have become idols in Egypt could be instead used for the service of God (of course, the Israelites actually just made an idol of their own, but that’s another story… Exodus 32).

The enemies of the Church were only too happy to report on the sex abuse scandal, and they did the Church an enormous service in doing so, bringing the truth to light and becoming true catalysts for reform. Likewise, even people with wicked designs or bad political ideas might also have a clear view of real problems that need addressing. We need the radical humility to listen and learn from this, so that we can despoil the modern Egyptians.