In Oakland, white priest sees racism in Catholic Church and fights against it.
The Catholic Church is racist. That’s what the Rev. Aidan McAleenan, the pastor of St. Columba Catholic Church, a predominantly Black parish on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, believes. It’s a belief shared by many Black Catholics in the Bay Area, I’ve learned.
In an emotional, 13minute video posted on Facebook on June 14, McAleenan, who is white, called Bishop Michael Barber, the head of the Catholic Diocese of Oakland, a racist and a liar. He said Catholic bishops are “all about the white, European sensibility.”
He went on to explain: After George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, McAleenan’s parishioners were in pain. He sent a text to Barber asking what he was going to do about racism in this country. McAleenan said he didn’t get a response. But Barber set up a meeting on June 12 to discuss McAleenan’s application for a sabbatical, he said in the video.
Instead, according to McAleenan, Barber criticized a homily McAleenan gave May 31 in which he had said the bishops of the United States had their knees on the neck of the church. McAleenan, who had hired a lawyer before the meeting, left furious.
In the video, the priest says: “The bishop of Oakland is a racist. He said to me, ‘Black people should be happy with the way the church and this country has treated them.’ He doesn’t like the Black church, and that’s just a statement of fact.”
Barber didn’t respond to my requests for an interview.
McAleenan, who’s been St. Columba’s pastor since 2008, took a leap of faith to start a conversation
on the institutional and systemic racism that exists in Catholic churches.
“I’ve been educated by the community,” McAleenan, 57, told me in an interview last week.
He said he’s learned about the depths of racism and white privilege during his time at St. Columba, and after reading “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” he said he apologized to his congregation for “the times my white privilege prevailed.”
His parishioners stood firmly with him after his comments about Barber.
“He would be supporting the white power structure of racism if he remained silent,” said Timothy Gholston, a Black parishioner who has worshiped at St. Columba for more than four decades. “Most of us are not surprised in terms of calling the bishop out as a racist.”
“He spoke his truth. He spoke my truth,” Jo Ann Evans, another Black parishioner told me. “And he stepped out where many other priests would not. I found it to be kindred to my feelings about this diocese.”
To understand McAleenan’s approach, one must know a bit about St. Columba. Each year the church, one of the most progressive Black parishes in the country, commemorates Oakland’s homicide victims with crosses in the church’s garden.
There are 3 million Black Catholics in this country, and Oakland is one of 15 dioceses with a significant number of Black worshipers, according to the United Conference of Catholic Bishops. Black people are about 3% of the Catholic population in this country, which explains why you don’t see a lot of Black people in the church hierarchy.
St. Columba has had a tense relationship with Barber since he was installed as the fifth bishop of Oakland in 2013. He’s tried to merge Black churches, according to McAleenan, parishioners and priests I talked to. According to Gholston, he dissolved the ethnic pastoral center, which represented the interests of diverse cultures in the parish. In 2017, the parish withheld contributions to the bishop’s annual fundraiser to protest the closing of St. Martin de Porres, a West Oakland Catholic school that served Black and brown students for two decades.
“It didn’t have to close,” McAleenan said.
After the March 2019 death of the Rev. James Matthews, the longtime pastor of St. Benedict Church in Oakland known as “Father Jay,” the rancor between Barber and St. Columba thickened. Matthews was the first Black man to be ordained in Northern California and, according to several people I interviewed, including McAleenan, Barber didn’t want to include Black liturgical elements like a gospel choir at Matthews’ funeral. McAleenan and others pushed back.
“I’ve always known him to be a compassionate person, but he was not as culturally competent as he is now,” said Susan Wiley, a Black parishioner who attends St. Columba, referring to McAleenan. “I think he’s learned a lot being with this community that loves him so much.”
Wiley, a teacher in the diocese for almost three decades, said she’s ready to fight for McAleenan.
“I am worried, but I’m ready to stand up for him,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the
“He spoke his truth. He spoke my truth. And he stepped out where many other priests would not.”
Parishoner Jo Ann Evans, speaking of the Rev. Aidan McAleenan
diocese put me in touch with the Rev. Leo Edgerly, the pastor of Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Piedmont. I asked Edgerly if Barber
heard McAleenan’s message. “I think he hears it now for sure,” said Edgerly, who has discussed the video with Barber. “What Aidan is concerned with is that the experience of his people is not the experience of our bishop.”
In 1964, Edgerly, a West Oakland native, became the first Black seminarian in California. He’s now on a committee tasked with building a study guide for Catholic schools and churches in the state to address systemic racism.
“This whole woke movement that we’re entering into is saying to our white brothers and sisters, ‘Listen to us. We’re not making it up,’ ” Edgerly said.
Here, I’ll offer my personal testimony. My parents wanted me to be the first person in either of their families to graduate college, so they paid for me to attend private, white schools in New Jersey before we moved to South Carolina. I lasted only a few weeks in a Catholic kindergarten class, and McAleenan’s video spurred me to call my mother and find out why.
She said a teacher denied me access to a reading program because, my mother recalled the teacher saying, “children in the afterschool program weren’t mature enough.” Let me translate: It was the teacher’s opinion that the black and brown kids, who needed afterschool care because their parents worked, were unfit for the program.
“When you weren’t selected for that program, I pulled your ass out of that school,” said my mother, who is still fired up almost four decades later. “I was upset because I knew you knew how to sound out words, because I had been reading to you all your life.”
In the video, McAleenan said Catholic bishops are concerned most about making white people feel comfortable when it comes to race.
“There’s no way to have an honest conversation about race in America without making white people uncomfortable, because the honest truth is if it were up to people of color, racism would’ve been over and done with centuries ago,” said the Rev. Bryan Massingale, a Black professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University who has written extensively about the history of racism in the Catholic Church. “The only reason why racism persists is because it benefits white people, and that’s a very uncomfortable truth.”
McAleenan wants to keep the uncomfortable conversation going.
“If we as a church can’t come together and build bridges, what hope is there for the secular world to do it?” he asked me.
Heaven help us all.