Sins of the Father

By now you’ll have seen the disturbing footage from Buffalo of a rather grandfatherly looking gent being shoved backwards by the Police, followed by the image of dark blood seeping from the back of his skull as it smacked into the concrete.

It turns out that this 75 year old man was Martin Gugino, a long standing peace activist and member of Amistad Catholic Worker. I’m tempted to say he’s one of our own, if only to highlight the acute problem of us not always thinking of everyone else on such protests as ‘one of our own’.   

Fortunately, Martin’s condition is described as stable and his friends say Mr Gugino would want us all to get back out onto the streets and continue to protest and resist alongside Black Lives Matter activists, while he remains in hospital, just as Dorothy Day stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.  

That after all, is the Catholic Worker way but if you were to ask a Catholic Worker how else we might address the persistent sin of racism in our society and in our Church too, you’ll probably get offered an answer which involves a combination of nonviolence, personalism, communitarianism and the Works of Mercy as the solution.

We’d perhaps remind you of the fact that all races belong to the Body of Christ and of the dogma of the mystical body of Christ being the basis for our Catholic Worker Movement’s communitarianism.  

And while communitarianism (and a deep personalism which insists that all individuals have an inherent human dignity and are to be loved and respect) does indeed have a role to play in overcoming racism, you could be forgiven for thinking that such glib answers are dismissive and tone deaf to the lived experience of black people in our communities and parishes today.

Especially since these kinds of platitudes echo some of the same lukewarm statements and woolly promulgations on ‘healing the wounds’, which have poured forthwith from various Bishops Conferences and Church hierarchy over the years. 

Statements which persistently fail to provide a bold prophetic witness with the power to confront the legacy of our own privilege and ongoing segregation.

For example, our Catholic Worker movement is famously (and at times notoriously) pacifist. Equally, I also sit on the executive committee for Pax Christi Scotland which also works for a nonviolent Church and society. 

Personally I’d like to see our Church move closer towards becoming a fully fledge Peace Church, alongside Quakers and Mennonites and I believe that Gerald Schlabach’s recent book ‘A Pilgrim People’ provides a clear template for carrying out this work.

Yet, I honestly don’t believe that we, while enjoying the comfort of our white privilege, can legitimately deny ‘Black Lives Matter’ its righteous anger.

It’s far too easy for us to piously lecture others, as Christians speaking from on high, about the necessity for nonviolence protest, especially when it’s not our kids who are being beaten and shot at in the streets every single day.

Rather than our judgements, we’d be much better served listening and offering our solidarity and prayers with our black brothers and sisters. In particular, our prayers and solidarity should be with all those leaders within predominately Black Churches working for peace in their own communities, resisting the threat of violence in all its forms.

Does this mean we remain silent in the face of injustice and in doing so, become passively complicit with the ongoing suffering which we see all around us? No, not at all, it simply means that we take a step back from being well meaning, white middle class do-gooders, pontificating to everyone else how we might fix racism and instead, allow ourselves to be led by leaders and voices from within the community.

You might well ask, which practical method we can use to achieve this solidarity? Well, we can continue to get involved in the same expression of Catholic Social Teaching which many inner city Catholic parishes in the US and in the UK have embraced for the last 70 years – Community Organising!  

Community Organising is about creating broad based alliances of grass-roots organisations and building the power of civil society, so that communities can take power for themselves and hold decision-makers to account.

 The original methods of community organising first developed in the poor areas of Chicago in the 1940s. These methods were made famous by Saul Alinsky and Catholics like Bishop Bernard James Sheil and former seminarian Edward T. Chambers. http://www.sconews.co.uk/feature/58946/birminghams-revolutionary-giants-2/

The iron rule of community organising is ‘Never do for others what they can do for themselves’, emphasising the need to always develop new leaders from within local organisations but in my opinion, the question of how we white Catholics should approach the issue of historic slavery must also include a few other rules.

Rules such as  - Don’t keep bringing up the plight of your Polish, Italian or Irish great grandparents every time the legacy of slavery comes up, this isn’t an expression of empathy or some form of intersectionality. Rather, the idea of anti Irish, Polish or Italian racism being on a par with the impact of the transatlantic slave trade is a self-centred distraction from the issue at hand, too often coming across as the worst kind of false equivalency and whataboutery.

Don’t immediately reach for the nearest statue of your favourite historical black saint as to prove your inclusive credentials. To some degree, there is nothing inherently wrong with proudly displaying your Mum’s best statue of St Martin De Porres https://www.sconews.co.uk/feature/58482/roch-on-wee-nan/

but there is a whole vibrant expression of contemporary black Catholicism out there.

Perhaps embrace the cause for Julius Nyerere’s canonisation http://www.sconews.co.uk/opinion/60332/julius-nyerere-african-saint-or-socialist-sinner/ or educate yourself about the life of Blessed Benedict Daswa https://www.scross.co.za/2019/12/what-is-a-real-covenant-with-god/

Most importantly, call out the absolute heresy of racism taking root in our Church and as millions of workers face unemployment due to the ongoing pandemic, stand against the rising tide of nationalism which falsely presents itself as the radical solution to the failures of capitalism.

As Dorothy Day wrote in the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 –‘we were in the third year of the Depression. No smoke rose from the factories, mortgages were being foreclosed, breadlines of listless men wound along city streets. It was for these people and their plight that we created the Catholic Worker.’