2017-03-02

"The Catholic Church and the Black Lives Matter Movement: The Racial Divide Revisited"

Bishop Edward K. Braxton

Diocese of Belleville

14th Annual Tolton Lecture, Catholic Theological Union

February 28, 2017

Peace be with you. I am certainly very grateful to all of you for coming this afternoon, but especially to Father Francis, to Sister Reed, and Dr. Lymore for their very kind hospitality this afternoon and their invitation to deliver this 14th annual Augustus Tolton Lecture. Though we have prayed, I am going to ask that we pray again a prayer that we have composed for this occasion. Let us pray.

Oh, God of love, justice, and mercy, we give you thanks for the life of your servant and priest Father Augustus Tolton and we pray for the day of his canonization. He labored in our country at a time when many who were members of your body the church were blind to the cruel injustice of capturing and buying and selling free human beings and forcing them into bondage under the lash. We thank you for Father Tolton's example. Though frail of body, he was strong in spirit and did not allow this nation's original sin, prejudice, and segregation to keep him from following the gospel of Christ. You enabled him to see that same Christ in others, even those who scorned and oppressed him.

His ministry nurtured the seed of the Catholic faith in the African-American community here in Chicago and we pray that you will glorify your servant Father Tolton by hearing us as we pray through his intercession that the different communities in Chicago will work effectively to bridge the racial divide in this our city, our church, our neighborhoods, and our hearts. Purify our hearts of bias and prejudice of every kind. Remove the weapons of violent words from our mouths and the weapons of violent deeds from our hands. Make us true instruments of your peace. Hear our prayers in the name of Jesus, the bridge-builder, the liberator of the oppressed, and the prince of peace. Amen.

All of you, I hope, have an outline for this presentation. It would be helpful, if you don't have it, to obtain one so you'll know where we are going. If you look at the outline, you will see that Roman numeral number seven, American Citizenship and So-Called Minority Groups, the number D will actually be given as number A, A Paradigm Shift. Number D will be given as number A, A Paradigm Shift. Everything else should follow the example as it is written. The Catholic Church and the Black Lives Matter Movement: The Racial Divide Revisited.

Countee Cullen was a leading poet in the Harlem Renaissance. He along with Langston Hughes gave voice to the fact that black lives mattered long before the slogan came to be. In one of his great poems, called Incident, Countee Cullen described an experience that he had when he was only eight years old and realized that his black life did not matter to many people. He wrote:

Once riding in old Baltimore,

head filled with glee,

I saw a Baltimorean

kept looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small

and he was no whit bigger.

And so I smiled but he poked out

his tongue and called me n****r.

I saw the whole of Baltimore

from May until December.

Of all the things that happened there,

that's all that I remember.

Roman numeral one, this is not a simple topic. Everyone has an opinion. The imperative listen, learn, think, pray, and act. I was born here in Chicago at Michael Reese Hospital. I grew up here. It is certainly a magnificent city filled with a great variety of people of all different backgrounds enjoying the joys and the pleasures of a world-class city, the culture, the architecture, the food, the education, and so much more. It's a great city to be enjoyed by all. Nevertheless, we all know that Chicago is sadly the tale of two cities. There is the one city that I described that is very vibrant and very real and enjoyed by many including people of all racial and religious backgrounds and supported by serious, responsible, and dedicated law enforcement. Chicago is also the city featured in the media in recent months or even years.

Featured as a city of violence, racial conflict, poverty, police corruption, despair, political neglect, fear, and hopelessness. The city is marked by a great deal of racial and economic divide. Many dedicated laypeople, religious, deacons, priests, and bishops have labored diligently to bridge that divide with some success in some areas, but as we know the city is still a tale of two cities. Like every other major city in the United States, when you raise the question the racial divide, you are raising something that is not a simple matter. Everybody has an opinion depending on one's age, one's background, one's education, where one has lived, one's personal experiences, depending on what one reads or does not read. Depending onto whom one speaks.

Depending on whether one spends one's leisure time watching CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or PBS, or whether one does not watch any news but simply reads the headlines in USA Today. People form their opinions about the complex conflicts that are plaguing the United States today that I have described as the racial divide. There's no easier way to get into an argument than to express your opinion about the racial divide in the United States before you will be confronted by someone who will tell you that what you think is completely wrong and what they think is completely right. It is not a simple subject. Everyone has an opinion. It's important for you to know that I am not here this afternoon to solve a problem or to answer a question. I'm here to simply contribute to what I hope has been an ongoing conversation, simply contributing to a conversation that you've already been having with yourself and with others. Heed the ongoing conversation of what I call the five imperatives. The five imperatives. It's very important that we listen, learn, think, pray, and act.

Each one is important, not only in terms of theology, but in terms of our daily lives. We must all listen, truly listen to ourselves, to our friends, to our parents, to our teachers, to our religious community, to our Catholic tradition, to the voice of scripture, to the voice of Jesus in conscience of the teachings of the church, and listen to the secular world as well. Listen carefully. Not just Facebook or Twitter or cable or paper headlines, but more seriously by reading and studying and debating and arguing and reflecting. Listen, listen, listen. To learn. To learn from listening and to think about what we've learned. Then to pray about what we have been thinking about. Finally only after we have listened, learned, thought, and prayed, only finally do we act--tentatively perhaps, because we're not always sure what we should do in the face of complex challenging situations. It's a cycle that moves back onto itself.

Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. You don't conclude, "now I know what I should do in every single circumstance, so I'm going to charge ahead and do it," because new experiences come to you, new ideas, new circumstances. Once again, you must listen, learn, think, pray, and act. I recommend it to you as a paradigm for thinking about how to move about in this world. Listen, learn, think, pray and act.

Roman numeral two, Black Lives Matter in Chicago. Emmett Till, Tom Robinson, To Kill A Mockingbird, Mr. Laquan McDonald and the Chicago Police Department. One of the defining experiences in my life growing up in Chicago happened in September of 1955. In that year, young Emmett Till, who also grew up in Chicago was 14 years old. He was sent by his family to Money, Mississippi to visit relatives in the south.

While he was there he was suspected of flirting with at 21 year old white woman. The woman's husband abducted the young man, beat him beyond recognition, shot him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River where he was found several days later. When his hideous, disfigured body was returned to Chicago, his grief-stricken mother, Maimie, insisted the casket should be open for the public viewing so the world can see what they did, what they did to my child. As it happens, many years later in 2007, the woman alleged to have been flirted with, Caroline Bryan Dunham, acknowledged to Timothy Tyson when he was writing the book, The Blood of Emmett Till, that well it really didn't happen. I just made it up. It was just a lie, she said. A deadly lie. My Uncle Ellis who was from the south, born in the south, took me and my dear brother Lawrence to the visitation in A.A. Reiner Funeral Home. My uncle repeatedly told us, "I don't want you two to ever forget this night." We reached the bier and I peered into the glass coffin and beheld the terrifying remains of a vicious murder.

He did not even look like a human being. His mother was sitting in a chair sobbing uncontrollably, "My baby, my baby, why did I send him down south." I looked in her red-rimmed eyes not knowing what to say. As we rode home, my uncle told Lawrence and me, "when you grow up, whatever you do, don't go south. Don't go south. Don't live there. Don't work there. The same thing could happen to you. They would just as soon kill you as look at you. Heed my words," he said. I have never forgotten what my Uncle Ellis told me that sad night. I've never forgotten the totally unrecognizable, bloated, mutilated face behind the glass coffin. I've never forgotten the raw anguish on Maimie Till Mobly's face. I have never forgotten. Everything about this experience came rushing back to me as a bishop when in 2002 the apostolic nuncio Archbishop Gabriel Montolo sent for me to the nunciature and he said to me, "Your Excellency, His Holiness Pope John Paul II has appointed you to serve as the second bishop of Lake Charles in Louisiana." Louisiana. For a moment, I was stunned. Don't go south. Don't go south.

Nevertheless, I did go south where, fortunately, much has changed though certainly everything has not. I embraced the people of God with an open mind and an open heart. Happily, while there there were only a few painful, very painful experiences. Still, the vast majority of the people of southwest Louisiana warmly welcomed me and my five years serving there were happy ones. I came to know members of the Christian faithful who have remained dear to me till this day, to this day. I'll never forget the image of Emmett Till. His black life mattered. Tom Robinson, To Kill A Mockingbird. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. Some years after Emmett Till's wake when I was 17 and a student Quigley Preparatory Seminary studying to be a priest in the archdiocese, a group of seminarians went to see the film version of Harper Lee's masterful novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Everyone knows it as the story of Atticus Finch and upright and honest white attorney as seen through the eyes of his children, especially his daughter Jean Louise Scout and and Jem. Of course, it is also the story of Tom Robinson, also upright, and honest.

An African-American man and he's the one who dies, so in some ways it's more about him than Atticus Finch. It is the story of Tom Robinson who, like Emmett Till, is falsely accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. The all white jury finds Tom guilty though he is in fact innocent and he is murdered while attempting to run away from the police during the appeal process. When the movie was over, my classmates and I were talking. One of my friends said, "you know, my father told me years ago, all you need to know about the relationship between white people and black people is this. Birds of a feather flock together. It's that simple. It's a law of nature. It always was. It always will be. This is why in the archdiocese of Chicago the Poles have their parish. The Irish have their parish. The Germans have their parish. The Italians have their parish. The Hispanic have their parish. Yes, a few black people have their parish. Everybody knows that people of different backgrounds and different races and nationalities do not want to live or worship together. They all want to be with their own kind."

Birds of a feather flock together. Sadly, my classmate made no comment about the sad fate of Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird. Still, Tom's black life mattered. It mattered a great deal.

Mr. Laquan McDonald, Chicago Police Department and the Department of Justice. Many, many years later, on October 12th, 2014, a young man, Mr. Laquan McDonald, who was 17, the same age I was when I saw To Kill A Mockingbird, and armed with a knife, died after being shot 16 times by Chicago police officers. Officer Jason Van Dyke. The shooting was record on a police car dashboard camera. However, the video which showed Mr. McDonald walking away from the officer was not initially released to the public. The Black Lives Matter movement joined those expressing anger over what many considered to be a politically motivated delay. On November 24th, 2015, over 13 months later after the shooting, the video finally was released and as a result the police officer was charged with first degree murder. Though days later he was released on bail.

There were massive protests and demonstrations in downtown Chicago disrupting traffic, blocking streets, demanding the resignation of Mayor Emmanuel and the dismissal of police superintendent Gary McCarthy. Superintendent McCarthy did resign, but the mayor remained in office pledging significant reforms in the Chicago police department which frequently had been accused of racial bias many, many times in the past. Recently, on Friday, January 13th, 2017, after a 13 month investigation, then attorney general Loretta Lynch in the justice department offered a critical report of the Chicago police department detailing many, many failures throughout the Chicago police department, including widespread instances of excessive force in dealing with African-American and Hispanic Americans which rarely, rarely, if ever, were challenged. The report came as the city is shaken by nationwide attention to alarming levels of violence in Chicago, murders at a 20 year high.

Just last week, three young people, two-year-old, I believe, a three-year-old, and 11-year-old dying so tragically. A growing distrust of police. Especially in poor, urban neighborhoods. This report said in part, "We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone including unarmed individuals." The current police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, said, "I am realistic about the fact that there is much, much, much more work that needs to be done." Much more work that needs to be done. With rthe eport issued by then Attorney General Lynch, the justice department put the city's problems on record and set in motion the negotiations for what is called a consent decree, a process that leads to the city committing itself to certain dramatic changes as they did in Cleveland after the death of Tamir Rice thanks to the same attorney general. However, it is well-known that the new administration may embrace or abandon the idea of consent decrees, especially since the new president, Donald J. Trump, has spoken against court-enforced settlements or consent decrees when they deal with representatives of the police department.

Mayor Emmanuel says no matter what the federal government does, he will follow the concrete decisions that were presented in this report. Let's hope so. Let's hope so. Laquan McDonald's black life matters. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. Listen, learn, pray, and act.

Roman numeral three, His Black Life Mattered. Father Augustus Tolton 1854-1897, a saint for our times, his early life, and the priesthood in Quincy and in Chicago. The servant of God Father Augustus Tolton would understand the trials of an Emmett Till and the trials and tribulations of a Laquan McDonald. He would understand them from his own experiences. His brief life, his brief life of 43 years, overlapped with the lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, two towering figures who we honor in February during African-American History Month. As we know, Father Tolton's life ended in 1897. President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. The great Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and scholar, he died in 1895 just two years before the death of Father Tolton. It is interesting that we justly honor Abraham Lincoln, but sometimes we mythologize him into a man that he was not.

While it is true that Abraham Lincoln began the slow process of gradually ending the buying and selling of free human beings with the Emancipation Proclamation, I will not say he freed the slaves, because before God they were already free. President Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so." Some have said Frederick Douglass was in fact the conscience of Abraham Lincoln and nudged him to the Emancipation Proclamation. It is fitting, therefore, that it was in African-American History Month in February 24th, 2011, that I was able to be present in the St. James chapel of the former Quigley Seminary when His Eminence Francis Cardinal George, then archbishop of Chicago, and Bishop Joseph Perry, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, and the Dodson postulator of the cause, took the first steps leading to the canonization of Father Augustus Tolton. He would be a great saint for our times.

Father Tolton was born an enslaved free human being to parents who were also enslaved free human beings. I will not say they were slaves. They were enslaved free human beings. They were all baptized as Catholics by an arrangement of the Catholic family who owned them and sadly did not see the contradiction between their Catholic faith, their faith in Jesus Christ the liberator, and their presuming to buy and sell other human beings. His mother, Martha, escaped from those who held him and her and her children in bondage and found refuge in Quincy, Illinois, a station on the underground railroad where it happened the children were able to attend and gain Catholic education. Later on, his priesthood in Quincy and in Chicago, young Augustus Tolton felt a desire to become a priest but there was no way he could study for the priesthood in the United States because there was no seminary that would even consider accepting a young man of African descent.

Finally the Propaganda Fide, the famed seminary in Rome that trains young men for the missions, accepted him, and he was ordained on April 24th, 1886, three years after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation. He returned to the diocese of Alton, Illinois, now embracing what is now parts of Belleville and parts of Springfield. The bishop assigned him to the small, poor, negro parish, St. Joseph. Many local white priests told their people that they should stay away from the colored church. When white parishioners went to hear Father Tolton's homilies or received the sacraments from him, the priests told them to cease. One priest, who was a dean, told Father Tolton to confine his work to the colored church and went to the bishop and asked the bishop to tell the white parishioners not to go to listen to Father Tolton. Some white Catholics stopped pretending, but others continued to support Father Tolton because they found what he had to say moving and inspiring. Indeed, he became well-known as a speaker locally and nationally.

In the end, he was almost driven out from the area by the lack of hospitality and the blatant racial prejudice, the gaping racial divide. As it happened, Archbishop Patrick Feehan of Chicago, learned of Father Tolton's painful rejection in the Alton diocese and invited him to Chicago in 1889 to serve and organize the small African-American Catholic community on the south side of Chicago. He opened a storefront church in Chicago and later he built a church for the growing African-American Catholic community at 36th and Dearborn. Father Tolton attended with great zeal and joy to the needs of the people. He did so tirelessly. He became a familiar figure in the poor littered streets and dingy alleys, in the negro shacks and tenements on the south side of Chicago. Sadly, he worked himself to exhaustion. He poured himself out in service to the people. As a result, his health was not strong and in early July 1897, an unusual heat wave struck Chicago. Many even lost their lives and Father Tolton himself suffered a heat stroke under the daily scourge of 105 degree heat and collapsed on the street.

The doctors took him to Mercy Hospital who worked frantically to revive him to no avail. Father Tolton died at 8:30 in the evening on July 9th with his mother Martha, his sister, and a priest at his bedside. A brief life, but a good life, a holy life, a saintly life. Father Tolton is the first priest of African descent born in the United States and ordained to serve the church here. His canonization would certainly be a milestone in the Catholic history of this country. It would certainly be a gift and a grace to us. Father Tolton would truly be a saint for our times and we are very fortunate that the postulator has cause. Bishop Perry is here with us and we should thank him for all he does to help to advance this cause because it is no simple matter. It is no simple matter. We do thank you, Bishop.

Moving right along. Black Lives Matter, the Museum of African-American history and Culture, the history galleries and role of the Church.

Hopefully, all of you are familiar with the new museum that has been erected on the mall, long in coming, the Museum of African-American History and Culture was opened and dedicated on September 24th, 2016. It was presided over by President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, the president who signed the document for this building's erection as well as President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. This museum was long in coming. The first request to have a museum for African-Americans on the mall was 100 years earlier when veterans of the civil war approached the government for a memorial to black veterans in 1915. It was dismissed immediately as a ridiculous idea. There was no point in honoring Negroes from the war. Later on, it was proposed yet again in the 1940s. The proposal went nowhere. Later, prominent writer, James Baldwin, and baseball legend, Jackie Robinson, in the 1960s pressed for the museum, thinking they had some influence with the powers that be. Their efforts failed. Finally, in 1986 Congressman Micky Leland from Texas, sponsored and successfully passed legislation for the museum, but he perished in a terrible plane crash abroad.

Congressman John Lewis aggressively took up the baton which led eventually to the erection of this museum 100 years in the making, not erected until long after a museum had already been built on the mall to victims of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany, a terrible tragedy that didn't even happen in this country, and yet it was easier to build a museum to that tragedy than to the tragedy of American people did on their own land. It should not come as a surprise to you that this was so long in coming considering the longstanding thesis that people of color had no history, had no culture, indeed, the longstanding thesis that black lives do not matter. The towering figure, Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, is depicted in the Museum of African-American History standing in front of the Declaration of Independence of which he was a principal author. He's standing in front of bricks, one after another, each one representing the free human beings that he owned, including Sally Hemings, a woman that he owned and took to himself as a mistress and with whom he had children.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. Never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting, touching poetry. Among the black is misery enough. God knows but no poetry. I advance therefore that blacks are inferior to whites in the environment both in mind and in body." Thomas Jefferson notes on the state of Virginia, Query 14. It's in the DNA of our country in a certain way that black lives do not matter. Happily, generations of artists and poets and musicians and people of so many cultures in the African-American community have proven that Thomas Jefferson was wrong, dead wrong. In this great museum, a magnificent work of architecture, stunning to see, you find in the history galleries an overview of the movement from slavery to freedom, from freedom to the era of segregation, and from the era of segregation to the era of change, 1968 and beyond. I spent part of three different days going through this remarkable museum. It's almost exhausting to see it all in one day.

I arranged after the bishop's meeting in November to go to Washington to spend several days in Washington so I could go day to day and visit every part, not spending so much time on the joyful, delightful, amusing, entertaining upper galleries, but mainly in the bowels of the museum, the history of sadness and suffering. The one thing that you learn going through these galleries is this. Obviously, money and the complete disregard for the value and dignity of the human person or the center of the enterprise that uprooted more than 12,500,000 West Africans from their homelands, their family, their language, their religion, and brought them in chains across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, money was the reason for it. Nothing else.

Once here, men, women, and children worked unceasingly under the hot sun and the lash on the sugar cane, cotton, and tobacco plantations and all matter of difficult labor and they were rewarded with degradation, humiliation, and backs torn open and bleeding from the taskmasters whip. While the plantation owners grew wealthier and wealthier and wealthier through the trade of cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane which would be harvested from the plantations, taken back across the Atlantic, and then the ships went down to West Africa and back across the Atlantic again in what is called the Middle Passage. Therefore, the great scholar, Edward Es. Baptist in his book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, he makes it clear the America's original sin of buying and selling free human beings, it was a huge financial enterprise bringing great wealth to those who own the free people who served as the machines of capitalism. It was the enslaved free human beings who were machines of capitalism that brought great wealth to their captors and great degradation to them. To so many at that time, those black lives did not matter.

Those black lives did not matter. As you go through the galleries, the history galleries, it is impossible to ignore the fact that religion played a great part in the lives of the people from Africa in the Americas. They brought with them traditional religions and mystic religions. By some estimates, many don't know this, 30% of the enslaved free people from Africa were of the Islamic faith even then. It is a surprising turn of history and grace that the enslaved human beings took comfort in variations of Christianity even though their oppressors could not see the contradiction between their Christian piety and their absolute cruelty to their human possessions. Excluded from mainline Protestant churches and certainly excluded from the Catholic churches, they established their own Baptist communities and their own unusual religious communities where they gathered something from one and something from another. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church which remains the heartbeat of many African-American communities to this day.

The resilience and the forgiving heart of Charleston's Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after the June 17th, 2015 slaughter of the innocents by self-proclaimed white nationalist and confessed mass murderer Dylan Roof bears witness to the heartbeat and vitality of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States to this day. Going through the Museum of African-American History and Culture, you would long and hard to see anything about the role of the Catholic Church. There is a passing mention of the sisters of the holy family, a passing mention of Catherine Drexel, but no monument, no great exhibit. Indeed, some giants in our history like the great Mother Henrietta De Lyle, Father Augustus Tolton, Hearthrug Seth, Mother Mary Lang, Julia Greeley, Sister Thea Bowen, are not to be found in this museum. I hope all of their names and histories are known at least to you. All of them have been proposed for consideration for canonization. One can only hope that in time their achievements will become better known and the gallery only displaying about 3,000 of about 45,000 artifacts that they have will one day include these in their exhibit.

They must listen, learn, think, pray, and act. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act.

We move on to Roman numeral four, the tension between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. The Black Lives Matter movement is quite an extraordinary reality when you think about it. It primarily came about because of this, the sudden organized group, doesn't have a charter or constitution, though the website has more and more on it these days. It exists because of this. Because you can tweet, because you can use Facebook, when something is going on that seems untoward, where there are two people watching it suddenly there are 20, then 200, then 1,000. It exists primarily because of this remarkable entity which really shouldn't be called a telephone at all. It should be called some kind of a wonder that came forth from Steve Jobs who of course was an immigrant in a sense. His natural father was from Syria. That's another subject.

The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag, a kind of protest slogan the fueled an internet driven international protest confronting what its originators and others believed to be the indifference to the death of young unarmed black men at the hands of white law enforcement representatives. The phrase is more a call to action against racial profiling, police brutality, and racial injustice than a specific organization. The first appearance of Black Lives Matter seems to have happened on Facebook when a post was put there by a Miss Elisa Garza and Miss Patisserie Clorsulon and Miss Opal Tomes used as the expression after Mr. George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Mr. Tray von Martin, 17-year-old unarmed African-American youth who died in Stanford, Florida. These women and other activists created the Black Lives Matter hashtag and social media page. Later after Mr. Darren Wilson, a former police officer, fatally shot Mr. Michael Brown Jr., 19, another unarmed African-American youth in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement gained greater prominence, demonstrators and marchers gathered around the country and around the world shouting, "Hands up, don't shoot!" Whether or not Mr. Brown's hands were up or not has been debated.

Then after the police choking death of Eric Garner in New York, "I can't breathe. I can't breathe." Finally, "Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter." To call attention to what was perceived by many to be the systematic biased and racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and in particularly in the behavior of some representatives of law enforcement. Some law enforcement. Not all. Not most. We all know that being a police officer is very difficult, very dangerous. Many people of color are police officers. They leave their homes everyday taking their lives in their own hands not knowing if they will return home safely. They must make difficult decisions in a split second. When I spoke in Indianapolis recently, the police chief was in the audience. He said, "I like those imperatives listen, learn, think, pray, and act, but how do I get my police officers to be able to do that in a split second when they are faced with a situation which may be one of life and death?"

We must never forget that, the fact that there are some police officers who are doing terrible things--that is not most, that is not all, that is some. The complaint was the Black Lives Matter movement was that not that all young black men are good and perfect and never do anything wrong. They say, well of course they're bad sometimes and do things that are wrong. Their complaint was that even someone who has broken the law should not be tried, convicted, and executed right on the public street. That is their complaint. They should not be tried and convicted and executed right on the public street. This became the Black Lives Matter movement all over the country and sometimes represented in many countries of the world. Significantly, Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson, the distinguished pediatric neurosurgeon and author, who briefly was, by a strange fate and stranger fortune, a leading Republican presidential candidate and is now, surprisingly, Secretary Designant for Urban and Housing Development in the new administration. Dr. Carson has argued that many people involved in the Black Lives Matter movement are misguided.

He has argued that it is not unjust treatment by white police officers that kills American urban communities. He argued that law enforcement and the judicial system are not the reason why young African-American men and women are unemployed, lacking in skills needed to compete in a modern job market. Dr. Carson believes that many African-American families are suffering from self-inflicted wounds. As a pioneering specialist in health care of infants, he has expressed a particular concern about the number of African-American lives that are swept from their mother's womb by abortion. Dr. Carson has singled out failed public schools as a source of African-American suffering because they are not really teaching children how to learn. He argues that the actions of rogue police officers take black lives one at a time. However, public school system has destroyed black lives not one at a time, not in ones and in twos, but in whole generations. The failure of public schools do not kill as quickly, but they kill just as surely as bullets do according to Dr. Carson, Black Lives Matter supporters counter to Dr. Carson.

They argue that his ideas are determined by his age, his social status, his conservative Republican ideology, and his strict adherence to the Seventh Day Adventist faith. Nevertheless, he raised his voice, he expresses opinions about Black Lives Matter and now is in a uniquely significant position to do something, whatever that may be. Father Augustus Tolton never uttered the phrase black lives matter as far as we know but he showed that he knew that black lives matter by the way he spent his life. He lived the truth that black lives matter. Now in the face of the long list of African-American men who have died in altercations with white police officers and the growing list of police of both races who have been killed or wounded by African-American men, one way of simplifying a difficult and emotionally stressful situation is to focus on a single mantra, by saying black lives matter, white lives matter, blue lives matter, brown lives matter, all lives matter.

Critics of Black Lives Matter like the New York former mayor Giuliani has said, "The Black Lives Matter movement is nothing but a group of cop killers, racist, and domestic terrorists." Critics of those who argue for All Lives Matter have suggested this is simply an effort to turn attention away from the unique traumatic suffering of African-American people and to generalize in such a way as to be able to do nothing. Must it be either/or? Must it be either Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? Could it not possibly be both/and depending on your perspective? DeRay McKesson, 25, has given voice to the radical divide and the racial divide in the Black Lives Matter movement by becoming a Black Lives Matter leader. He ran for mayor of Baltimore briefly. He's become quite the spokesperson for the movement. Not too long ago, he was asked, "Don't you think, sir, that as a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement it would be better to persuade the group to change the slogan from Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter. You'll get much more support from the general public and the media. It won't be such a scary mantra. It won't suggest separation, but unity."

He answered saying, "I know that people are frustrated that African American people are focusing on the unique trauma that black people are facing in this country. But ask yourself this question. If you go to a rally to raise money to find a cure for breast cancer, would you shout out, 'Colon cancer matters. Colon cancer matters.' Or would you not understand that they know that colon cancer matters, but that rally is a rally about breast cancer. Can you see the difference?" He asked. I do not believe that black lives matter and all lives matter are necessarily compatible. All Lives Matter is not necessarily a way to divert attention of the urgent concerns of African American people. In order for there to be some compatibility between the two expression, however, it is necessary to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of people of color who suffer disproportionately in this country. This is something that many Americans don't accept. In order to exemplify, to clarify what I mean by this, we'll give you an example for consideration.

Imagine we were not having this balmy February weather but a typical Chicago February and there are about four inches or five inches and the temperature was going to drop below freezing tonight. You were in your very comfortable Hyde Park home with your family, your friends. The fireplace is burning. There's plenty of food in the refrigerator, warm dinner is going to be served. You have a video already in the VCR or in your television in order to watch a movie tonight. While you are preparing for this lovely family dinner with friends, the doorbell rings. The doorbell rings and when you open the door, you see a shivering starving homeless family of strangers. Perhaps they are Syrian refugees or perhaps they are from south side of Chicago. No matter. They say to you, "Sir or ma'am, we need some help. We need some food. We need some warm blankets. We need some clothes. We need some shelter. Can you help us?"

You say, "Well, I'm about to have dinner with my family and we're going to watch a movie later, but I think that about three miles south or about three miles west is a homeless shelter and you make your way there, they'll probably do something for you. The person at the door says, but sir, we can't get that far. We're so cold. We're so hungry. We're so tired. Our lives matter. You say, well so does my life. So does the life of the members of my family. Dinner's about to be served. I can't stand at the door any longer. Then the woman in the group comes closer so that you can see her and see the strain in her eyes and see that she hasn't eaten in a long time. Sir, couldn't you do something for us. Then at that moment in that instance, you realize that it is their lives and not yours that is in peril. In that moment, their lives are in peril and your life is not. This is the critical insight. In that instance, it is their lives and not yours that need to be attended to.

It is not that your life does not matter, but their lives are in peril. Isn't this the point of Jesus' answer to the question, who is my neighbor, and tells the story of the man beaten and robbed who's cared for not by people of his own nationality and religion but by a stranger, a hated Samaritan. If you simply say all lives matter there's a danger in ignoring the people at the door and falsely implying that every group of Americans is facing the same degree of peril which then makes it possible to ignore or deny pressing issues like frequent violent fatal treatment of African-Americans in the face of sometimes minor or only suspected misconduct. Black Lives Matter leaders say that those who say All Lives Matter really don't mean what they are saying. They point to George Orwell's famous novel Animal Farm. Hopefully many of you know Animal Farm. George Orwell's brilliant Animal Farm gives us a vision of a dystopian world, a totalitarian world. Every morning a special mantra is shouted and broadcast to all. All animals are equal. All animals are equal. All animals are equal.

Then, when there seems to be signs of revolt and revolution amongst those in this dystopian world, the mantra is changed. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The point of Black Lives Matter is that many in the American community face existential threats that cannot be ignored. At the same time, this should also mean the Black Lives Matter cannot be silent about the huge number of African-American men who die at the hands of other young African-American men, far more than those who die at the hands of rogue white police officers. They should not ignore the alarmingly high number of abortions that bring an abrupt end to nascent black lives that also matter. These things cannot be ignored if they are going to be consistent, but their focus is on other issues. Ultimately these things must be addressed. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act.

Roman numeral six, the Catholic Church and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Every Catholic knows from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that all lives do matter, but hastily asserting this universal truth can obscure the sad truth that people of color have often not been included as a part of all lives. I know many African-American Catholics who have felt from personal experiences that their black Catholic lives have not mattered as much as white Catholic lives. There are about 70 million Catholics in the United States. They're not in church on Sunday, but they're on the books. 70 million out of the 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, by far the largest religious movement in the world. At least until recently when Islam surpassed the Catholic church with 1.6 billion adherents, the fastest growing religious movement in the world by far. Of the 70 million Catholics in the country, there are about 2.9 million African-American Catholics. With such a small number, there are many diocese where there are no black Catholics at all and many where there are very few. This means that many white Catholics, in certain states and rural communities especially, have virtually no contact with African-American Catholics.

Indeed, many do not think there are African-American Catholics. How often has it happened to me on an airplane wearing my suit and collar and someone would say to me, "Are you some kind of a minister or something like that?" Something like that. "I'm a Catholic." So am I. "You're a Catholic. That means you're a priest?" Yes. I am. "I didn't know they had them." They have a few of them. "What is that chain for?" I'm a Roman Catholic bishop. "Do tell? You are a bishop? They have bishops too?" Well, not many. We are rare orchids, often neglected and you won't see us in any prominent place. Many American Catholics do not know that there are African-American Catholics and certainly do not know there are African-American priests or sisters or deacons or brothers or bishops and of course the number is very small. You might be surprised to learn that African-American Catholics sympathize with some of the issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially younger people in their 20s and 30s.

Originally, my knowledge of the Black Lives Matter movement was just from reading articles in various journals and news accounts in the New York Times and major newspapers. Through some friends, I was able to make contact with individuals who have friends or relatives involved in the movement. I've had a number of direct conversations, email conversations, small group discussion, since the Black Lives Matter movement, but not an exhaustive movement because one cannot generalize. What may be true in Los Angeles is not the same as what might be true in Philadelphia. What is true in Philadelphia is not the same as what is true in Houston. What is true in Houston might not be the same as what is true in Chicago. It's a very fluid and very changing movement, very much so. My main impression is that those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement don't give much thought to the Catholic church and they think the church doesn't give any thought to them at all. As one person said to me, I just think we live in two different worlds. It's as simple as that.

While there's a degree of awareness on the part of the Black Lives Matter movement that the Catholic church's social, educational, and health care ministries make a positive contribution to black communities around the country, and they are aware of some of the important things they've done, that young people, for example, get a good education in a Catholic school even though they're not Catholic. They are aware of that, but it isn't that important to them for some reason. They're primary impression of the Catholic church is that it is a large, white, conservative institution that stands aloof from confrontational movements such as Black Lives Matter. They think the church is more a part of the problem than the solution because the church is necessarily alive to what they call white privilege.

The movement sees an incompatibility, as well, between themselves and the Catholic church's 'archconservative moral teachings,' their words, certainly not mine, 'arch conservative moral teachings' on marriage, marriage between one man and one woman, a permanent commitment, and the rejection of what has come to be called, not same-sex marriage anymore, but now more mellowly, marriage equality. The church's teaching on contraception and abortion, they reject that for the most part saying, using the language of the current generation, often used by the media, women's reproductive justice and women's right to choose. As always, in conversation when they say they are very much in favor of a woman's right to choose, they don't finish the sentence to choose her hairstyle, to choose her makeup, to choose her shoes, or to choose to end the nascent life in the womb, which is a different matter altogether.

Of course, they reject the church's teaching on homosexual activity, arguing in favor of what they call gay rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender concerns now in recent months wonderfully made neutral simply with the alphabet. LGBTQ. Unless you know what the letters mean, you are simply in the dark. I explained to the group that I was meeting with once, that the Catholic church's social doctrine may have more force than you think and may be more relevant to your concerns than you think. At the same time, I pointed out that the Catholic belief about the nature of marriage, the meaning of human sexuality and the dignity of every human life from conception to death are not mere cultural norms or social issues to the church. The church cannot and will not change these moral doctrines. These will be used to represent what the church firmly holds to be fundamental moral principles rooted in human nature, natural law, biblical revelation, and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

When I first said that, a great silence fell upon the group, but eventually they said, "well, putting that aside, let's talk about things that we might have more in common with and let's try to understand. Why don't you try to understand our point of view and we'll try to understand your point of view?" That's a step in the right direction. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act.

American citizenship and so-called minority groups. I've given variations of the points I'm about to share with you to many people and I can say from the very beginning, almost everybody who hears what I am about to say rejects it and says it is wrong. In fact, it's right. It is right. As I told you earlier, number D is now number A. A paradigm shift. What if I were to ask you sitting before me raise your hands if you think you are members of a minority group. Don't raise your hand, but what if I were to ask you that? Don't raise your hand. Who told you that you were? Why do you believe it?

How many of you would raise your hand if I were to ask you, how many of you thinks that you are members of the majority group? Don't raise your hand. Who told you that you were not a minority, but that you are a member of the majority group? I firmly believe that the use of the terms minority groups and majority groups in the church, in politics, and in media is arbitrary, sociologically incorrect, and wrong. It is primarily a reinforcement of what can only be called white privilege. The racial divide in this country is strengthened by such language. I realize as I've said that most of my past listeners, most of you will reject what I am proposing even though it is still right. In order to understand the core of the argument that I am making, you need to consider the concept of paradigm shift found in the work of American physicist and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. I hope some of you perhaps are familiar with his landmark, groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structures of Scientific Revolution. A marvelous work.

In it, Professor Kuhn describes a paradigm shift as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. He calls an epistemological paradigm shift a scientific revolution. Since the 1960s, the concept of a paradigm shift has been used in many non-scientific contexts to describe profound changes in a fundamental model, frame of reference, or perception of reality, events or social constructs. The idea of paradigm shift has had a major influence in so many areas. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, he gives us a classic example. The shift from the Ptolemaic worldview to the Copernican worldview. For the longest time, the geocentric worldview of Ptolemy, the Egyptian cosmologist, he thought the earth was stationary and the sun and the planets moved around the Earth. That model lasted until the time of Copernicus, a Polish priest in the 1500s, 1540. Everybody thought the Earth was stationary and the sun and the planets moved around the Earth.

The more and more information that was gathered, the more knowledge that was gathered, and once the telescope came on the scene, it became obvious that the Ptolemaic worldview could not compensate, could not integrate all the new data. That model collapsed and a new one emerged, the Copernican worldview, in which the sun is at the center and the planets move around the sun. That shift from the Ptolemaic worldview to the Copernican worldview is what he means by a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift. Nothing less than a paradigm shift is necessary to come to terms with the common use of the terms minority groups and minorities in the United States. How does it happen when we say who are the minorities in America, no one whose family came from Sweden raised their hand? No one whose family came from Luxembourg raised their hand. No one whose family came from France raised their hand. No one whose family members came from Germany raised their hand. How is it that everybody knows when you say minorities and minority groups in America, you mean exclusively African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and maybe Asian Americans, and possibly Native Americans.

What about Jewish Americans? What about Irish Americans? How can this be? The word minority means the smaller number or part, especially a number that is less than half of a whole number. 40 is less than 100. 40% would be a minority. 20 is less than 100, so 20% would be a minority. That's not what we do. Nothing about this definition can be used to argue that only African-Americans, only Hispanic Americans, are members of minority groups. Yet, if you see something on the evening news, stay tuned for our program tonight on the problems of minorities in America. You already know who's going to be on the program and you already know what the problem's going to be. How can that be? They didn't say who it was going to be about. You know. Because of the way language is used to manipulate you into thinking in this way. It is wrong. Exactly which American citizens are members of the majority group? There's not single ethnic or racial or cultural group that constitutes true Americans. Every citizen in this country is fully and equally an American in the exact same sense of the word.

Whether they are descendants from people on the Mayflower or descendants from slave ships or whether they're the latest immigrants from war-torn Syria. The selected use of the word minority as the collective designation of certain Americans perpetuates negative stereotypes. European Americans with roots in Ireland, Italy, and Poland, for example, were once ostracized in this country as immigrants, foreigners, and undesirable minorities. The same was true of Jewish people. Why are they generally not considered minorities today? The answer is not because any one of these groups constitutes the statistical majority of the US population. Read Noel Ignatiev's historic study How The Irish Became White and Matthew Fry Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. It explains the process of how people of different European countries gathered together and formed themselves as the majority groups against the minorities in the face of the Great Migration of people of color of the south in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Because, as you probably know, in days gone by, people of German, Polish, Italian background in the United States lived in separate neighborhoods, sometimes wouldn't even talk to one another because they were all different groups. The Great Migration of people of color from the south competing for housing, education, and employment led to this amassing of one group of people of European background as the majority even though they come from very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and there's no such thing as the white group, but different groups of people who have origins in different European countries. This has become so intense that even if European Americans become less than 50% of the population, they would still be considered the majority group. They would never be considered minority so that in cities in Texas, for example, I saw an article not to long ago about the growing Hispanic population in Texas and they wrote with a straight face, "In this city, the majority of the population are minorities." Even if the European population is the statistical minority, they're not minorities. They are the majority. They are the majority.

That is using language to control, very much like the Catholic church, unwittingly, I'm sure, but still truly, uses language in a way that to me is not helpful. The Catholic church often refers to our brothers and sisters of other Christian traditions as non-Catholics. Why do we call them non-Catholics? Why don't we call them Lutherans? Methodists? Presbyterians? Baptists? Jehovah's Witness? Call them whatever they are. When were you last called a non-Presbyterian? When were you last called a non-Baptist? You laugh, but really it's not funny. Why do we control language in that way? Even people who are Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians will say, "Well, we non-Catholics think ..." They've appropriated this language. Just as people of color say, "We minorities, we have to fight for our place at the table because the minorities have to be represented." How about the Americans need to be represented? The Americans of different backgrounds, the Americans who come from Ireland or Germany or Africa or Hispanic countries or whatever. All of us are American citizens and we all have a right at the table.

We're all free citizens hoping to be welcomed anywhere and treated fairly with justice in the public square, in the courts, and by representation of law enforcement. This would require a paradigm shift. A radical shift in the way we think. We have to think of the Ptolemaic and Copernican revolution. If we look at the way we use minority today, the sun, the view of Ptolemy would say that at the center of everything are not American citizens, but the central planet are people of European background. That's the central planet in the cosmology. People of European background, at least western European background, and then the smaller planets are people who come from African backgrounds or Hispanic backgrounds or Native American backgrounds. These are minor planets going around the sun, but the real, the true Americans are the ... Excuse me, I said it wrong. It's the earth that's at the center in Ptolemy's worldview. White people are the center and everybody else is a peripheral person. However, to understand the paradigm shift we'd have to say no. We'd have to go from the Earth being at the center, people of European backgrounds, that can't be the center.

We have to say the sun is at the center and the sun is all American citizens. Every American is at the center of the Copernican revolution. Every American of all backgrounds. The rays of the sun show the diversity of the backgrounds and the different planets represent the different places from which we come, but we all, what we have in common, our oneness is in our Americanness. If we were to say we're all Americans with diverse backgrounds, there would never be the need for minority/majority language. There would never be the need of minority/majority language. We would take seriously E pluribus unum, one from many. When as I've said, you won't believe this, and you won't follow this and within days you'll be talking about minorities and minority groups. Listen, learn, think, pray, act. We must conclude. I keep looking at my time, but I did not start at 4:00, keep that in mind. We must conclude. I remind you of the importance of the mantra listen, learn, think, pray, and act. It's so important.

Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. It will be useful to you in every circumstance you find yourself and in everything you do whether you're dealing with the racial divide, the Black Lives Matter movement, or your own discernment of your life and work. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. Listen, learn, think, pray, and act. Keeping in mind as we listen to these remarks on the racial divide in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement, every one of us can do something. Every one of us can do something. Do not say that because you cannot do something radical to change the world, you will do nothing. Remember what Saint Theresa of Calcutta said to me when I was with her in India, when I was teaching at the North American College in Rome when I went to Calcutta and I helped her sisters on the streets of Calcutta. I said, "but Mother Theresa, do you know that many American commentators say what you're doing is a waste of time. You're not changing the social structure of India. You're not tearing down the caste system. You're tending to the wounds of a few thousand people. ou're feeding them, clothing them, bathing them, giving them a place to die, but there are tens of millions. You're not getting rid of the whole economic structure of India and making it a just society."

Mother Theresa, without batting an eye, said, "no, I'm not. There may be somebody somewhere who can do those things. I'm not that person. What my sisters and I are doing what we can. We are doing what we can." Every one of us has to discern our own concrete situation. What can we do? Do what we can. Do what we can. I spoke to a group of college students recently in Indianapolis. We had a round table after the lecture. What do you mean what we can? Small things. Sit with people of a different background at lunch in the cafeteria. Start a conversation with them. If some family members or relatives are speaking about people of a different race in a demeaning way say, "Mom, Dad, Grandfather, I can't hear that conversation. I think that's wrong." In a very polite way, let them know you think it's wrong. Do what you can. It takes courage to do small things.

It's a coward who does nothing because you can't do big things. A person with courage does small things. Do what you can. All of you, all of you, have the possibility of finding out that there's something that you can do. One thing you can do is be attentive to the way Black Lives Matter has most recently begun to be portrayed in the media, giving us a new vision of black lives mattering in a way that never was the case in the past. Some of you may know that yesterday was the 89th presentation of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards for those involved in the film industry. For the longest time, the most celebrated film in Hollywood history, of course, is the film version of Margaret Mitchell's famous novel, Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchel, an Irish Catholic, writing about Terra and the families on the plantation in her novel were all Irish Catholic at Terra. In the film Gone With the Wind, all of the primary characters are white people. Red Butler, Clark Gable, Scarlett O'hara, Vivian Lee, Ashley Wilkes, Leslie Howard, Melanie Hampton, Olivia de Havilland.

However, the persons of color, like Mammy, the house slave, has no name in the book or in the film. When the film was premiered in Atlanta in 1939, Hattie McDaniel and the other African-American actors and actresses couldn't even stay at the same hotel. They had to stay in a small colored hotel. More than that, they couldn't even sit in the front seats of the theater, but in the balcony seats in Atlanta, Georgia. When the Oscars were awarded, it was shocking that Hattie McDaniel was given the academy award as the best supporting actress and not Olivia de Havilland who, of course, went on to win many other Oscars, though Hattie McDaniel would spend her entire life playing maids in all the movies. It's not insignificant that at that time, that novel and that movie, the people of color were minority groups and therefore not citizens, not human, but kind of creatures that Thomas Jefferson is writing about in his comments. More recently ther

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