Welcome to Friday. An excerpt from NCR opinion editor Olga Segura's new book talks about how the Catholic Church must make amends to Black people with reparations. Scores of U.S. Catholic dioceses had more than $10 billion in cash and other readily available funds when they received at least $1.5 billion from the nation's emergency relief program for small businesses slammed by the coronavirus.
In an excerpt from her new book, Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church, NCR opinion editor Olga Segura writes about how the Catholic Church must make amends to Black people.
In "A Christian Call for Reparations," the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas described the need for faith leaders to center the Black experiences as crucial for their spirituality and ultimate salvation. By rejecting white supremacy and actively working to repair the harm Christian institutions have done to Black Americans, faith leaders can work to become moral leaders. For the Catholic Church to place itself within this struggle, it must make amends for the ways that it, too, has harmed Black Americans since the birth of the United States.
Historian Shannen Dee Williams has challenged many of us regarding the church's true role in chattel slavery. Along with slavery came racial capitalism, an economic system that relied on the exploitation, torture, rape, and often murder of Black and indigenous people throughout American history. As the first churches were being erected across the country, as Catholic schools were being created, including some of the oldest Jesuit colleges, this country was simultaneously viewing Black women and men as objects that would enhance profit. Our own church, which claims to internalize the gospel, enslaved Africans; our own church used Black women, men, and children to promote its own well-being and success over Black livelihood.
Throughout the American church's history and well into the twentieth century, religious orders were also actively working to keep Black women and men out. Williams wrote that many Black women and men chose, instead, to start their own religious orders. Universities run by religious orders, like Georgetown University, were also complicit in racial capitalism. The Jesuits who ran Georgetown University in 1838, just forty-nine years after the first Catholic bishop in America founded it, sold 272 enslaved persons to avoid bankruptcy.
You can read more of the excerpt here.
Scores of Roman Catholic dioceses in the U.S. had more than $10 billion in cash and other readily available funds when they received at least $1.5 billion from the nation's emergency relief program for small businesses slammed by the coronavirus, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The financial resources of several dioceses rivaled or exceeded those available to publicly traded companies — like Shake Shack and Ruth's Chris Steak House — whose participation in the Paycheck Protection Program triggered outrage last spring.
The taxpayer-backed aid was supposed to help recipients that lacked the kind of financial safety net that cash and short-term assets provide.
While dioceses, their churches and schools went into the pandemic with billions, the cash catastrophe church leaders feared did not materialize, AP found. New financial statements that several dozen dioceses have posted for 2020 show available resources improved despite the pandemic's hard, early months — the same time they sought paycheck protection aid.
AP's analysis focused on available assets because federal officials tied those metrics to program eligibility. Therefore, the $10 billion AP identified doesn't count important financial pillars of the church in the U.S., including its real estate holdings and an estimated $9.5 billion held by charitable foundations created to help dioceses.
You can read more of the story here.
More background:
- In his latest column, NCR political columnist Michael Sean Winters says that while it would be great for the latest COVID-19 relief package to have bipartisan support, it is more important to have a policy that works and is not bipartisan than to have a bipartisan solution that does not address the clamant needs of the American people.
More headlines
- At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Joe Biden decried the "political extremism" that inspired the U.S. Capitol riot and appealed for collective strength during turbulent times.
- The Catholic Health Association, whose members treat one in every seven patients in the United States, is pledging to achieve health equity to help fight racism. The initiative was spurred by the association's members after the differences in health outcomes were laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, and police killings of George Floyd and others.
- NCR readers respond to NCR's latest editorial, in which we called for the Vatican to investigate the U.S. bishops' conference after their recent divisive rhetoric.
Final thoughts
Look forward to tomorrow's newsletter by our very own NCR opinion editor, Olga Segura. The newsletter will be called NCR Culture Weekly, and focus on all of the great content you expect each weekend — book reviews, spiritual commentaries and movie reviews — but will also feature Olga's thoughts on the different ways pop culture can inform our Catholic faith. Each week, she will share with readers what art, whether a song, book or TV show, she's moved by that week and why. As a reader of this newsletter, you are already signed up, but if you know someone that might be interested, they can sign up here.
Until Monday,
Stephanie Yeagle
NCR Managing Editor
[email protected]
Twitter: @ncrSLY
