Was the Church racist?

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Did the Church at one point in history ever accept racism?
 
No. In fact, the Church was one of the first institutions to speak in favour of the rights of indigenous peoples druing the colonial period.
 
How did they treat the racial scism and the slave trade in the United States?
 
You might want to do some reading of the Papal Bulls condemning the Spanish for their slave trade, first one was in 1484.

Into recent US History, priests and nuns were on the front lines of the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century.

That roughly 5 centuries of teaching should be some good reading for you.
 
I don’t think the Church itself was racist. But Christianity was used to justify racist thinking. That’s not the Church’s fault humans are terrible sometimes.
 
Mostly they were protestants, too.

We have many saints of various races. It is believed all mankind is made in the Image of God.
 
No. Jews and gentiles are equal in the eyes of God and the Church taught that all can be saved.

Admittedly, the people of the Church can be quite often do things and behave in a racist manner. They should need a reality check more often.
 
If the Church is so racist, why was marriage with Aboriginal groups in Latin America encouraged by the Church? And even then, it wasn’t necessarily just Aboriginal peoples. Latin America is a very diverse place, you can have people who are mixed with European, amerindian, and West African, and you can have people in the same families, where it’s someone looks like a stereotypical American Indian, where someone looks stereotypically black, or someone looks stereotypically European. This is especially true in Brazil. No, the Church is not racist, the Church has never been racist, the Church is for all people.
 
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Not sure if this is off topic but it seems that Muslims seem to treat Jews much better than Christians treat Jews throughout history? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
 
Not exactly, but our Lord referred to the Canaanites as “dogs” Matthew 15 and the Syrophenicians as “dogs” in Mark 7.

I said, “Not exactly”
 
But that was in an honor challenge that Jesus seemingly purposefully lost
 
ratio1 said:
Not sure if this is off topic but it seems that Muslims seem to treat Jews much better than Christians treat Jews throughout history? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
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I’ll bet you can find instances that go both ways – times when Muslims treated Jews better than Christians did, and times when Christians treated them better than Muslims did.
 
Sadly, the term “racist” is used in so many inaccurate ways that few even know the meaning of the word.

Not all bigotry is racism, not all discrimination is racism. “Muslim” is not a race, nor is “Christian”.
 
Actually, yes. Lots of aboriginal children were taken from their parents and forced to go to residential schools, some of which were run by roman catholics.


Children were assimilated, abused, and torn from their families, which actually affected THOSE children’s families today, because of lack of family, and self-worth.


there’s orange shirt day every year as well to raise awareness and remember the children who were abused physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Maybe this is a bit of an overload, but as someone who’s half aboriginal, and has seen the brokenness left behind in reserves and my father’s family, it’s something I’m definitely passionate about.

All this is in Canada, I’m not sure about other places, but racism definitely sneaked into the Catholic Church at one point in time. From what I’ve read in this thread it’s not as well known as it should be.

But yeah. With all that being said, of course many churches have apologized, and it wasn’t all the Catholic church, there were some protestant churches as well that ran residential schools.
 
Yep, people have failed. People who work for the Church have failed, some of them have committed serious crimes.
 
There were no doubt racist Catholics (probably are still some) and certain racist civil policies were tolerated at times, but the Church’s public doctrine has always opposed racism.

For example, here’s an encyclical from Pope Paul III in 1537, harshly condemning racist attitudes and actions towards the indigenous people of the Americas, including treating them as animals or depriving them of their liberty.

 
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Joe1 said:
Did the Church at one point in history ever accept racism?
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No, the Church never accepted racism. However, there were some people in the Church who did or were afraid due to racism.
 
Joe1 said:
How did they treat the racial scism and the slave trade in the United States?
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Rome was against racism, but there were racists in the American pews. And American bishops were either (a) afraid of the racists or (b) had some prejudices too.

But the Church was not racist. When the first African American priest was refused by all the Seminaries in the United States that they reached out to (he was from Chicago - so I don’t know if they tried to get him in every single seminary, or he was rejected from the ones applied to), the Pope accepted him to study in Rome.

Then, when he thought the Pope would send him to Africa after becoming ordained, the Pope sent him back to Chicago to help people accept black priests in the United States.

His name was Father Tolton http://www.toltoncanonization.org/

So in summary, yes there were racists in the Catholic Church in the United States, but the Church herself was not racist. After all, we have always had African priests in the Catholic Church.
 
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Racist is used pretty loosely these days. The Church has always taught a certain equality among all men. That doesn’t mean that particular Catholics always followed this teaching.
Kei said:
Mostly they were protestants, too.
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I don’t think it fair to just say this was Protestants. From what I know I do think Protestants were more insistent on the separation of the races. But the Catholic Church in America did to some extent go along with the prevailing attitudes.
Joe1 said:
How did they treat the racial scism and the slave trade in the United States?
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A better question is how did they treat the slave trade in Catholic countries. The slave trade to the US was trivial compared to the trade to Brazil. And Brazilian slavery, and Cuban, ended long after it did in the US.
 
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