Gulf Pine Catholic
•
July 18, 2014
13
Church faced challenges to undo slavery’s legacy,
embrace civil rights
By Russ Shaw
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- On Oct. 24,
1963 -- a little more than eight months be-
fore President Lyndon Johnson signed the
landmark Civil Rights Act into law -- Bishop
Robert E. Tracy of Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
urged the Second Vatican Council to take a
tough line against racism. Speaking for the
American bishops, he said doing that would
“greatly help the bishops to teach their peo-
ple.”
The bishops of the U.S. really did need all
the help they could get back home. While the
hierarchy in recent years had become increas-
ingly outspoken on the subject of race, many
American Catholics remained unpersuaded.
Only in 1960, after all, had the election
of John F. Kennedy as president symbolically
marked the end of American Catholics’ own
experience of being targets of bigotry. Long
victimized in this way, the Catholic commu-
nity could point to relatively few bright spots
in its record on justice toward others up to
then.
One bright spot was in 1948, when Arch-
bishop -- later Cardinal -- Patrick A. O’Boyle ordered
the desegregation of Catholic schools in Washington,
six years before the Supreme Court did that for pub-
lic schools. Culturally speaking, Washington was still
a Southern town, and it took courage for Archbishop
O’Boyle to do what he did.
Even so, as a senior in a Jesuit high school in Wash-
ington a few years later, I listened to a heated argument
over segregation between our homeroom teacher and
several of my classmates. The young Jesuit insisted it
was wrong. The kids maintained it was part of the natu-
ral order of things.
That was hardly new. In its day, even slavery was
taken for granted. Archbishop John Carroll, the first
bishop in the United States, had a black manservant
named Charles whom he specified should be freed --
but only after the archbishop’s death. The Jesuits in
southern Maryland kept slaves to work on their planta-
tions. So did Catholic plantation owners in Louisiana.
Prejudice against blacks flourished among Catholics
at less elevated social levels. Church historian Msgr.
John Tracy Ellis says that even as their numbers grew in
the U.S., the Irish tended to accept slavery where they
found it, seeing no reason to disturb “a system which
for the first time in their lives had placed others at the
bottom of the social ladder.”
As a group, theAmerican bishops said nothing about
slavery and took neither side in the Civil War. Catholics
fought in both the Union and Confederate armies. More
than 40 priests served as Union chaplains and about 30
as chaplains to the Confederates.
After the Civil War and well into the 20th century,
Catholic leaders were preoccupied with the pastoral
care of the huge number of new Catholic immigrants
pouring into the country, leaving little time, energy and
resources for evangelizing African-Americans.
The bishops’ post-World War I
“Program of Social
Reconstruction,”
published in 1919, contained progres-
sive proposals on matters like Social Security and labor-
management relations. Many of these eventually came
to fruition in America. But the document had nothing to
say about racial justice and civil rights.
In time all this began to change. While issues like
workers’ rights and pacifism were the priority issues for
Dorothy Day, she and her Catholic Worker movement
helped carve out a niche for social activism inAmerican
Catholicism. Eloquent voices like that of Jesuit Father
John LaFarge began to be raised on behalf of racial jus-
tice. Revulsion at Nazi racism helped build support for
equality.
Here and there, Catholic interracial groups be-
gan springing up, with more than a hundred of these
in existence by 1965. Bishops, individually
and collectively, issued statements calling
for racial justice. Desegregation of Catholic
schools and other institutions spread. As the
civil rights movement gained traction under
the leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., a substantial body of American Catholics
were prepared to join the effort.
Large numbers of Catholics took part in
Rev. King’s famous March on Washington in
1963. Two years later, nearly 400 priests and
scores of religious sisters and brothers as well
as laypeople from all over the country took
part in historic civil rights demonstrations in
Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. The big
civil rights bills of the 1960s received the
church’s backing. And, as Louisiana’s Bishop
Tracy had asked, Vatican II in 1965 delivered
a strong condemnation of racism which it
called “incompatible with God’s design.”
Nevertheless Catholic opinion on the race
issue was divided. Pro-civil rights sentiment
encountered public resistance from Catholics
in places such as Chicago, Milwaukee and
later Boston. Angry rank-and-file Catholics
complained that activist bishops and clergy
were pushing African-Americans’ rights at
their expense.
After race riots rockedWashington in 1967, Cardinal
O’Boyle issued a pastoral letter that said in part, “Our
efforts to eliminate segregated slum housing have been
feeble. Our support of desperately needed programs and
job training and job opportunities for unemployed Ne-
groes in our ghettos has been far less than adequate. ...
Our welfare programs have too often been paternalistic,
demeaning, and inadequate and have weakened family
life.”
Less than a year later Rev. King was assassinated
and violence erupted in Washington and other cities.
Now the awful truth was clear: Generous words, peace-
ful demonstrations, and even laws and court decisions
weren’t enough to undo the legacy of slavery quickly.
The nation had a long, hard slog ahead to accomplish
that. And so, it appeared, did American Catholicism.
Shaw, the author of 21 books, is former secretary
for public affairs of what is now the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops. He covered some of the events
he wrote about in this reflection as a reporter for the
National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service, a
predecessor of Catholic News Service.
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson is pictured in this 1964 photo with a
group of civil rights leaders who include the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., Clarence Mitchell and Patricia Roberts Harris. Johnson signed the
Civil Rights Act into law July 2, 1964.
CNS photo/Yoichi Okamoto, courtesy LBJ
Library
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