The church needs to reclaim a leadership role on race in America

It was the summer of 1954, just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court had troubled the waters of race in America with its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A 35-year-old World War II combat veteran, a black man, knocked on the door of the rectory at Holy Family Parish in the eastern Kentucky city of Ashland.

The veteran, a Texan, had just been hired onto the staff at the local federal prison, and he wanted to speak to the pastor, Msgr. Declan Carroll, about enrolling his children in the parish school. If admitted, they would be the first black children to attend Holy Family School, and the first black children to attend school with whites anywhere in Ashland. (The public schools would not be integrated until 1960.) It also would be their first experience attending school with whites, since, it goes without saying, segregation was the law of the land in their East Texas hometown.

“I don’t see why your children shouldn’t attend our school,” the priest told the veteran. “But just to be sure, let me check with the bishop.”

A few days later, the veteran was summoned to the telephone at work. Msgr. Carroll was on the line.

“Mr. Wycliff,” the priest said, “the bishop said the Catholic schools are for all Catholic children. Your children will be welcome at our school.”

And so we were—my brother Francois, my sister Karen, and I—genuinely welcomed in the school, and our family welcomed in the parish. My mother, who still exchanges Christmas cards with some of her friends from Holy Family, recalls that on our first Sunday in the parish, Carroll met us at the front door of the church and said, “Sit anywhere you wish.”

That was important because in those days it was not uncommon in the South and the North for black Catholics to be sequestered in the back rows of otherwise all-white churches. Carroll was telling the Wycliffs that we were full members of Holy Family Parish.

It’s probably because I saw, so intimately and at such a young age, what the church at its noblest is capable of on the issue of race that I have paid close attention ever since to events at the intersection of Catholicism and race.

But there’s more to it than just my own youthful experience. I have been privileged in my now almost 62 years to meet and occasionally work with some of the lions of the Catholic interracial movement and the campaign for civil rights. I think of figures such as Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., past president of the University of Notre Dame and a charter member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; the late Msgr. Jack Egan of Chicago and his indefatigable sidekick, Peggy Roach; the late John McDermott, founder of Chicago’s venerable newsletter on racial issues, The Chicago Reporter; Father George Clements, former pastor of Holy Angels Parish in Chicago; and one of my own professors at Notre Dame, John Kromkowski, longtime head of the Washington-based National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs.

There is a long and noble Catholic tradition of advocating and working for racial peace and justice, and it deserves to be honored and preserved and extended. The work is not yet finished, and the temptations to abandon it are powerful.

“As Sen. Barack Obama campaigns as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.”

This quote from the June 22 edition of The Washington Post suggests the dimensions of the work that remains to be done. Those three in 10 are just the ones who would admit their racial prejudice to an interviewer. How many of the rest harbor such feelings but wouldn’t admit them?

Taking up Obama’s challenge in his March 18 Philadelphia “race speech” to discuss the issue, Dawn Turner Trice, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, created an online forum, “Exploring Race,” which she moderates.

Whites are far and away the most numerous writers to the forum, says Trice, an African American. Her dominant impression is that they are largely ignorant of other races, especially blacks. “You get the sense that they hang around in racially homogeneous groups,” Trice says.

Very often, she says, a white writer will have a question about race provoked by an encounter with a black person, perhaps a co-worker, but “they seem to have a fear of asking that person rather than asking me.”

Trice doesn’t mind serving as a sounding board. “Maybe,” she says, “this column is a place they can come and be exposed to something beyond their usual sightlines.”

But it obviously would be far preferable if people of all races could be familiar and comfortable enough with one another to satisfy their curiosities by talking frankly.

Jon Nilson, a Loyola University Chicago theologian and author of Hearing Past the Pain: Why White Catholic Theologians Need Black Theology (Paulist Press), observed in an interview in this magazine two years ago that white ignorance of blacks is an outgrowth of the racial isolation in which most whites live and which the church abets.

“[I] think residential segregation profoundly affects the nature of Catholic life at the parish level,” Nilson said. “We have many all-white parishes and therefore our most frequent ordinary Catholic experience is already giving us a distorted picture of who we are as a church in this country. I think we need to rethink the parish system, so it is not so tied to the social sin of residential segregation.”

Even within the current parish system, another Catholic institution, the school, has played an outsized role in the struggle for equal education for black children. Just as it was for my parents, the Catholic school has been the alternative of choice for black parents intent on getting a quality education for their children and unsatisfied with the public schools.

Indeed, in vast swaths of many racially isolated inner cities, Catholic schools have been the sole safe, dependable sources of elementary and secondary education, graduating a disproportionate number of the African American children who go on to successful college careers. Research by many social scientists has found that Catholic schools tend to be particularly effective in educating black boys, with whom public schools for some reason have special difficulty.