Oakland Black Catholics demand action
The Catholic Church is once again preaching a commitment to address racism, and Oakland is at the center of the current racial uprising inside the church. Here’s a brief recap: In an emotional, 13minute video posted on Facebook on June 14, the Rev. Aidan McAleenan, the white pastor of St. Columba Catholic Church, a predominantly Black parish on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, called Bishop Michael Barber, the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland, a racist and a liar.
In the video, McAleenan 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.’ ”
In a statement on the diocese website, Barber denied saying that to McAleenan.
“I am on a journey, as are we all, learning what I can do as the shepherd for our diocese, in helping our parishioners change our actions to meet our words and our professed faith,” wrote Barber.
He also published an editorial supporting the Black Lives
Matter movement in The Catholic Voice, a diocesan publication.
Sadly, that would’ve been enough effort before George Floyd’s death in police custody.
Black Catholics in Oakland are demanding action. What’s happening in the Catholic Church is inextricable from the racial reckoning happen
ing across the country as Black people and their allies refuse to let institutions deny, deflect or dismiss systemic racism.
“We’re not letting it go,” said Timothy Gholston, a Black parishioner at St. Columba who helped organize the meeting of Black Catholics I attended at the church last week.
“Our tendency has been that when the hoopla dies down, we become complacent again,” said Cheryl BryantBruce, a Black parishioner of St. Benedict Catholic Church in East Oakland. “We can no longer be complacent. The Catholic Church notoriously has not been accepting of us.”
A halfcentury ago, the Catholic Church preached a commitment to address race.
In April 1968, the Black Catholic Clergy Caucus denounced the Catholic Church as “primarily a white racist institution.” The statement came two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, now known as the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, responded with a statement on the nation’s race crisis.
“Catholics, like the rest of American society, must recognize their responsibility for allowing these conditions to persist,” the statement read. “It would be futile to deny what the Commission on Civil
Disorders has told America — a white segregationist mentality is largely responsible for the present crisis.”
It took two decades for the church to name the first Black archbishop in the United States. How long are Black Catholics supposed to wait for change this time?
“We see the church being complicit in white supremacy, and until we can deal with the structural issues, we can’t pray this away,” said David RobinsonMorris, director of the Center for Equity, Justice, and the Human Spirit at Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically
Black Catholic college in the country.
There are 3 million Black Catholics in this country, which is about 3% of the Catholic population. But there are only 250 Black priests, which is less than 1% of the 36,000 priests in the U.S., according to the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops data.
There are only eight Black bishops in the U.S., where the Catholic Church is almost 60% white.
Larry Kamer, a spokesman for the diocese, told me that Barber plans to meet with St. Columba’s parishioners.
“This is a conversation that he wants to have throughout the diocese — not just in black churches, but in all churches,” Kamer said. “He believes there is work to be done to cleanse our community of the sin of racism, and the structures of injustice and violence that make us all accomplices.”
Again, the Black Catholics I’ve spoken with want more than words.
“You have to say I’m willing to or I am going to do x, y and z,” said Chiquita Tuttle, a Black parishioner at St. Benedict’s, referring to Barber. “I’m going to have a forum with Black Catholics to talk about their concerns and to look at how we can have some resolution to this problem.”
There needs to be accountability, Kaya Oakes, a Bay Area author who has written books about Catholicism, told me as we discussed the church’s hesitation to address racism.
“What can the church actually do for Black people who are suffering right now? And beyond just ministering to them, what kind of reparations can it offer for its past?” Oakes said. “That’s the question the church needs to be asking itself, but that requires a humility that people in hierarchical positions — they don’t do very well with being humble.”
The hesitancy seems hypocritical to Catholic doctrine.
“Given everything we know about how whites typically respond to talking about assertions that they are privileged or have advantages, there’s going to be a lot of fighting over whether or not these differences exist, whether or not they’re legitimate,” Rosalind M. Chow, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business told me. “There’s a lot of mechanisms that people who are in power, people who have benefited from the ways societies have structured — they have a lot of tools at their disposal to try and push back on these narratives that are trying to make an impact through change.”
In a June 21 homily, Barber spoke of the Catholic Church as the ultimate source of healing and reconciliation.
“Jesus is the answer to every question and concern we have, and he is the perfect model of justice and love,” he said.
What would Jesus do if the sheep in his flock begged him to address systemic racism?