Where do people get the idea that Black Catholics don’t exist and the church has been silent on issues of race?

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glencor63 said:
Many White ethnic groups discriminated against African-Americans and actively opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Those White ethnic groups are predominantly Catholic
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This sounds like you believe white ethnic discrimination is predominantly Catholic. I think that is an absolutely unjustified statement that you probably do not realize is slanderous. It is impossible for me to believe for a second that, e.g., Catholic Irish, for example, were harsher toward blacks than, e.g., southern “crackers”.

I grew up in the Ozarks, myself, where there are not all that many Catholics, and almost no blacks at all. From the very first when I was in grade school, the sisters made it very clear that discrimination was sinful. Our very textbooks contained stories portraying black people in a favorable light. When I heard anti-black statements, it sure wasn’t from my fellow Catholics.

I do realize that nowadays everybody and everything that isn’t “black” is conclusively presumed to be racist. Most Catholics in this country came from Europe after slavery had ended. Therefore, few slaveowners were Catholic except in Louisiana. And, in Louisiana, slavery existed, but it was different, with intermarriage between blacks and whites not uncommon in New Orleans and elsewhere in southern Louisiana. In French Louisiana, it was governed by the Code Napoleon, not the English Common Law, and slaves were presumed able to eventually be free, and many became free. It wasn’t the “chattel slavery” of British law.

The Catholic Church is not an “ethnic church” except that it sort of turned out that way with many ethnicities in the U.S. because slaves took on the religion of their masters, and almost no slaveowners were Catholic. But the Catholic Church is the most interracial church on earth, by far.

The Catholic Church is the favorite scapegoat in this country. As some wag put it, anticatholicism is the “last socially acceptable discrimination in the U.S.” And it’s true. And it’s also true that if it were not for Catholicism in this country, the winds of paganism would blow away most vestiges of Christianity here.
glencor63 said:
Personally encountering Jesus Christ is very important to African-American Christians
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And they’ve never heard of the Holy Eucharist? In my parish, we have a lot of converts, and most are from Fundamentalist groups, and “being close to Jesus” in the Eucharist is what they’ll say is what brought most of them to the Church.
 
glencor63 said:
There’s an autocratic and authoritarian worldview underpinning much of Catholicism which is anathema to a historically disenfranchised people
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I think the Irish would be surprised at this judgment. They were disenfranchised longer than blacks in this country, and yet embraced Catholicism. It’s not a matter of “autocracy” and “authoritarianism”. It’s a matter of having faith that Jesus didn’t lie when he gave Peter the power to bind and loose. We accept much on faith, where many (but not all) protestant sects insist that their subjective judgments of right and wrong are right even when they’re objectively wrong. Do black people believe in hell? If they do, then they are accepting “autocracy”, just from a different source; their own view of what the bible says with absolute authoritarianism will send them there.
glencor63 said:
Ironically, it was an encounter with a racist seminarian which dissuaded Clarence Thomas from pursuing the priesthood.
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Do you think so? He’s still Catholic, you know.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I do realize that nowadays everybody and everything that isn’t “black” is conclusively presumed to be racist.
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And we can file that prejudice under the “Don’t confuse me with the facts, I already have my mind made up” file. It is knee jerk in its response, and is the newest woke position. And none of that is to say that racism does not exist.
Ridgerunner said:
The Catholic Church is not an “ethnic church” except that it sort of turned out that way with many ethnicities in the U.S.
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Without getting into issues of Blacks being discriminated against (and they were, by higher ups in the Church as well as those in the pew), the fact was one step further; they brought from Europe their tribalism, and it was one white ethnicity against another.
Ridgerunner said:
As some wag put it, anticatholicism is the “last socially acceptable discrimination in the U.S.”
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Phillip Jenkins released a book entitled The New Anti Catholicism.
 
Thanks for this! I just spoke with a priest at my parish and it always helps me to talk to someone especially a priest. This has gone on my entire life and it got worst when I wanted to be Catholic. The priest even laughed when I told him that we went to a Pentecostal Church that was mostly white and because it was mostly whites my mom wanted to leave and she said she liked the church and how old fashioned it was but never went back and I told her after that I still wanted to be Catholic because, I enjoyed it the most and she got mad. She has so many false beliefs that it’s ridiculous. I can’t do or say anything without there being an issue so, sometimes I finally just give up and then she calls me lazy and says how I don’t like to work hard and all kinds of others stuff but, sees all this as just trying to help and that all her points are always valid.
 
I agree with you wholeheartedly and it’s unfortunate and also very sad.
 
Ridgerunner said:
And, in Louisiana, slavery existed, but it was different, with intermarriage between blacks and whites not uncommon in New Orleans and elsewhere in southern Louisiana.
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If you think there were so many mixed raced individuals in LA due to interracial marriages then you are mistaken. Light-skinned ‘Free people of color’ existed, but they were not created inside of interracial marriage, which was illegal except for 1868 to 1888 in Reconstruction. In 1910 the LA legislature expressly banned such marriages, as they had been banned from 1699 to 1868.

Ridgerunner said:
The Catholic Church is not an “ethnic church” except that it sort of turned out that way with many ethnicities in the U.S. because slaves took on the religion of their masters, and almost no slaveowners were Catholic. But the Catholic Church is the most interracial church on earth, by far.
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Actually, worldwide Islam is more interracial than Catholicism, by far. In my hometown there were two Italian parishes, a Slovak parish, a Portuguese parish, a Polish parish and one Irish parish. Most had at least one Mass on Sunday in a foreign language. Ethnic divisions were acknowledged in the American Catholic church and seen to. And there were many white ethnic Catholic groups which opposed the civil rights movement. I was a Catholic high schooler when MLK was shot and mourning that tragedy was considered by many of the students as ‘traitorism’, as was interracial dating.

Even Clarence Thomas spoke of anti-MLK animus in the seminary.
 
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Polak said:
I’ve gone into a church I haven’t been to before and felt stared too, by white folks. Given that your go to theory of ‘probably racism’ isn’t available, what’s your backup explanation?
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First thing I do is check my zipper.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Servant of God Julia Greeley, a former slave who helped the poor and is buried in the Denver cathedral

en.wikipedia.org

Julia Greeley​

Julia Greeley (ca. 1833-48 – 7 June 1918), was a Black American enslaved woman, later freed by the Missouri Legislature. Greeley was born into slavery in Hannibal, Missouri. At the age of five, her right eye was injured by a slave master as he was whipping her mother. This disfigurement remained with Greeley the rest of her life. In 1865, she was freed under the Emancipation
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I live in Greeley Colorado. I’d rather we were named for her than for Horace Greeley! (He, of the Go West, young man journalist)! It never would have happened, however. It took years before our city recognized the contribution of Hispanics, much less of blacks!
 
Funny. I should check my zipper, but a black person should immediately assume it’s racism right?
 
Ridgerunner said:
This sounds like you believe white ethnic discrimination is predominantly Catholic. I think that is an absolutely unjustified statement that you probably do not realize is slanderous. It is impossible for me to believe for a second that, e.g., Catholic Irish, for example, were harsher toward blacks than, e.g., southern “crackers”.

I grew up in the Ozarks, myself, where there are not all that many Catholics, and almost no blacks at all. From the very first when I was in grade school, the sisters made it very clear that discrimination was sinful. Our very textbooks contained stories portraying black people in a favorable light. When I heard anti-black statements, it sure wasn’t from my fellow Catholics.
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On the other hand, that is to say, with the perspective of someone who grew up in an ethnic Catholic family, parish, and city and who lived and worked in several other similar cities, while I do not believe that white ethnic discrimination is predominantly Catholic, I certainly observed that a sense of such discrimination certainly was prevalent in some ethnic Catholic communities which, if not as harsh as that of the southern “crackers” you referred to, definitely approached it with vestiges remaining to this very day.
 
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angel6288 said:
My mom won’t listen to anything that has to do with the church. It only will upset her and cause an argument. Trust me I’ve tried constantly for the first two years of my journey and she said I wasn’t who she raised and I was trying to be White and that I was a follower and that the devil got in me and how the devil lives to separate families and cause confusion.
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I am so sorry that you are having this trouble with your mother! Sometimes all we can do is to pray for someone. I pray that she at least lets up on you!
 
You completely misunderstood my post and are chasing a straw man.

Never did I say the irish were slaves or anything like it. The previous post was about disenfranchisement which, it suggested, was perpetrated by Catholics. I observed that the Irish were disenfranchised (both here and in Ireland) longer than blacks were in this country.
 
Nepperhan said:
If you think there were so many mixed raced individuals in LA due to interracial marriages then you are mistaken. Light-skinned ‘Free people of color’ existed, but they were not created inside of interracial marriage, which was illegal except for 1868 to 1888 in Reconstruction. In 1910 the LA legislature expressly banned such marriages, as they had been banned from 1699 to 1868.
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You are correct when it comes to formal laws. But they were frequently honored in the breach. There was a lot of difference between slavery in the “latin” colonies and the British ones, and it’s just wrong to identify Catholicism with racism.

"During the antebellum period, Louisiana’s free people of color enjoyed a relatively high level of acceptance and prosperity, a legacy of the state’s French and Spanish founders, but as the American Civil War approached, white society increasingly turned against them. Most heavily concentrated in New Orleans, many worked as artisans and professionals. Significant numbers were also found in Baton Rouge, St. Landry Parish, and the Natchitoches area, where some were plantation owners and slaveholders.

The Roman Catholic faith, which, at least initially, discouraged the enslavement of anyone who had accepted Christianity, contributed to the relatively liberal attitude of the Spanish and Portuguese toward free people of color.

In some ways, the French had a similar outlook, imagining a society where class was more important than race and in which everyone was entitled to fair treatment, provided they had been baptized into the Catholic Church. For all its harshness, the French Code Noir, adopted in 1685, included articles protecting the rights of freed slaves, which were essentially the same as those of whites, with the exception that they could not vote, hold public office, or marry a white person

The French were also more tolerant of racial mixing, especially in sparsely settled frontier societies like Louisiana, where there were significantly fewer white women than men."

https://lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/fpoc/history.html
 
All the same, it appears the condition of free persons of color was massively superior to that of the chattel slave elsewhere. From the article:

" Martin points out that “on the positive side, plaçage created a class of free people of color which was well-educated, cultured, wealthy, and powerful” (69).

Nowhere did I attempt to defend slavery. What I said was that in French southern Louisiana, the condition of blacks was much better than it was under British chattel slavery. Some of that was due to differences in the law. Some of it was due to the influence of the Catholic Church.

Not ideal. But in an era in which people were sent to Devil’s Island, drawn and quartered, and put on galleys for life, it could have been a lot worse. Judging that era by the standards of our own may be considered fair, just as later generations will look back at ours and wonder how on earth we could have countenanced abortion on demand and the degradation of marriage.
 
Placage was adultery practiced by Catholics. Adultery is a mortal sin!
 
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