If bishops want to face racism, own your own complicity, theologian says

• John L. Allen Jr., Ines San Martin Shannon Levitt
• crux now

If bishops want to face racism, own your own complicity, theologian says

[Editor’s note: On Wednesday, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops announced a new Committee Against Racism, with the mandate of galvanizing both the Church and the broader society. Last week, in the immediate wake of Charlottesville, “The Crux of the Matter,” Crux’s weekly radio program on the Catholic Channel, Sirius XM 129, asked Father Bryan Massingale to discuss what the Church has done on the race issue, and what it could do going forward.]

 

Following the racial ugliness on display recently in Charlottesville, Virginia, America’s leading Catholic expert on African-American theological ethics, and perhaps the country’s best-known black Catholic priest, says the Church still has a long way to go to live up to the U.S. bishops’ own 1979 declaration that racism is a “radical evil.”