CNA Staff, Sep 22, 2020 / 12:00 am (CNA).-
A Black Catholic leader said Friday that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is the wrong organization to lead an important movement against racism in the U.S., because, he said, it asserts a relativistic agenda that will cause harm to Black families.
“While it is important to affirm the truth that black lives matter, unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter organization (BLM) itself is ill-equipped to lead,” Louis Brown wrote in an essay published Friday in First Things.
“Black lives do matter—the phrase is correct that all God’s people deserve love, dignity, truth, and freedom. Our brothers and sisters who peacefully protest for justice with signs of ‘black lives matter’ march justly. However, there is a difference between asserting ‘black lives matter’ and the BLM organization itself, which is seriously flawed.”
Brown, executive director of the Christ Medicus Foundation, is an attorney who worked for the Democratic National Committee, before his pro-life views led him to leave the position. Brown has worked for both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and in a senior position in the civil rights office of the federal department of Health and Human Services.
The phrase “#BlackLivesMatter” began to trend online following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and a movement grew amid protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 after a young black man, Michael Brown, was shot in an altercation with a police officer.
“Black Lives Matter” has become the rallying cry for a broad social movement. But there are also specific organizations which take the name “Black Lives Matter.” The largest and best-funded of those groups is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which has a network of local chapters around the U.S. and in other countries.
Brown said that organization “asserts a worldview of moral relativism that recognizes no objective truth, ‘disrupts’ the natural family, and undermines the natural law foundation of civil rights. Its agenda divides people in an arbitrary manner that will, ironically, lead to greater strife especially for black families.”
“By advocating for gender ideology, BLM rejects the basic truths of human dignity in the natural law. Gender ideology replaces the scientific and biological reality of maleness and femaleness with the false belief that one’s sex can be changed. However, as both Pope Francis and the African Cardinal Robert Sarah have asserted, gender ideology is a false construct with no basis in scientific reality. Gender ideology is destructive because it rejects the truths of male and female existence. There can be no dignity or freedom without truth,” he added.
The website of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation recently altered a page outlining controversial beliefs of the organization on the family and sexuality.
As recently as Sept. 17, the organization’s “about” page said the group was a “a queer‐affirming network” that works toward “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual,” to “dismantle cisgender privilege,” and to ‘disrupt’ the ‘nuclear family.’
New text on the group’s website reaffirms its positions on gender ideology, saying that “Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men — leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition.”
Brown is not the only Black Catholic leader to criticize the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and distinguish it from important calls for racial justice.
“It’s time to state honestly what BLM really stands for – destroying the traditional Family AND what it actually does – destroying property including religious building and objects!” tweeted Cardinal Wilfred Napier of Durban, South Africa, who himself is Black, on Aug. 28, in reference to the organization. Napier was a part of the Church in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.
Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, a Black Catholic deacon of the Diocese of Portland, Oregon, author, and co-host of EWTN’s Morning Glory radio show told Catholic World Report in August that, like Brown, he draws a distinction between a movement and an organization.
“When you put those three words together—black lives matter—as a social movement, it’s a statement of truth, which is a good thing.”
“But the term ‘black lives matter’ has been conflated with the national organization, Black Lives Matter. In a lot of people’s minds, when you say ‘black lives matter,’ people automatically think of the national organization,” he lamented.
Noting that the organization’s values “raise some red flags” for him, he mentioned especially that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation does not address the importance of fatherhood.
“Look at all that, plus the violence that is being perpetrated, the rioting, the looting, the tearing down statues, all of these things,” the deacon said. “No Catholic in good conscience can have anything to do with a group like that. Period.”
Brown’s essay said that the U.S. needs to address “racial discrimination and unjust inequality,” but called for a Christian approach to those issues.
He pointed to “police misconduct and racial discrimination in our criminal justice system, and to the disproportionate suffering that COVID-19 has wrought in many communities of color.”
“As a black man, I am pained to learn of police officers killing unarmed black people.”
“As an attorney who has also worked as a staffer in Congress and the executive branch, I have seen that the majority of law enforcement officials are good people seeking to protect and serve,” Brown wrote, but “racial discrimination in the criminal justice system continues in the form of racial profiling, police misconduct, and discriminatory criminal sentencing.”
Pointing to healthcare inequality, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, Brown noted that “Even once this health crisis ends, many African American communities will still not have the medical care they deserve. Historical patterns of racial exclusion have exacerbated negative health care outcomes. Ensuring that the vulnerable have access to proper medical care is necessary to restoring a culture of life.”
Brown’s essay came as polling shows declining support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and after the destruction of police stations and other public buildings amid protests in some cities, and the shooting of two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies Sept. 12.
On that date, a gunman approached a parked police car near the light rail station in Compton, California, opening fire with a pistol at the two police officers inside. Both survived despite multiple gunshot wounds, and the shooter fled on foot.
The officers, a 31-year-old mother and a 24-year-old male, had been on the job less than a year, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said after the shooting.
The incident garnered additional attention because of a protest that took place later that evening outside St. Francis Medical Center, where the officers had been transported for surgery.
A video posted by a local journalist on the scene shows several men shouting at a group of police officers outside the hospital, and one can be heard shouting “I hope they [expletive] die.”
Police arrested two people in connection to the protest, including the journalist who filmed the scene; the journalist was released later that night with a citation for obstructing a police officer.
Protestors blocked the path of the ambulance carrying officers to the hospital, and the LA County Sheriff’s office said via Twitter: “DO NOT BLOCK EMERGENCY ENTRIES & EXITS TO THE HOSPITAL. People’s lives are at stake when ambulances can’t get through,”
News reports have not confirmed whether the protest at the hospital was an officially organized event convened by Black Lives Matter.
Protestors identifying themselves as being affiliated with Black Lives Matter have staged protests at police precincts across the country in recent months, with mobs destroying police precincts in Minneapolis and Portland in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May.
Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, a local affiliate of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, did not respond to CNA’s request for comment.
Pentecostal minister Eugene Rivers, director of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, told CNA he considers it “a moral disgrace that the BLM organization did not condemn the shooting of the police officers in Compton, California. Under no circumstances could the moral and political failure to speak up be justified.”
Rivers, who is Black, called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation “a scam that exploits the suffering of Black people to promote gender ideology.”
The minister said the organization “is peddling morally, tactically, and intrinsically stupid ideas,” reminiscent of “the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and Revolutionary Action Movement and others who laid out an assortment of dystopian visions for the Black community and the country in general.”
Rivers said the group has “repudiate[d] Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy,” replacing it with “irrational ideas that have so quickly led to violence in its name rather than maintaining the non-violent high ground MLK staked out from his Christian perspective.”
Leaders of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles have said their efforts are more than a movement for racial justice, but are a “spiritual movement,” which have incorporated spiritual rituals into protests, drawing from animistic religions by calling forth deceased ancestors and pouring out libations for them.
Brown wrote last week that an authentic movement for racial justice needs to be rooted in love, and, ultimately, in Christ.
“Racial injustice is part of the culture of death. To build a culture of life in America, we need a revival of God’s love and a new era of civil rights,” he wrote.
“True justice is based on the foundational principle of civil rights: each person’s God-given natural rights as embodied in the natural law. Thanks to the natural law, abolitionists knew slavery was wrong even though civil law said it was right, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew segregation was wrong even though the voting majority in many states likely supported it.”
“A new era of authentic love and justice is needed and will begin with a Christian revival of love for God and neighbor. This love is the only force powerful enough to bring lasting healing.”
“The Christian faithful must rededicate themselves to love through spiritual and corporal works of mercy that serve communities of color and the vulnerable. We must give the best of the Church, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to those on the peripheries.”
“God calls us to do justice in bringing about the Kingdom of God and building up the culture of life,” Brown concluded.
“Agendas opposed to human dignity strengthen the culture of death, and can never lead us toward justice. As Christians, we must charge ahead in the love of Christ to lead a revival of God’s love and bring about a new era of Christian humanism in America.”
[…]
Another door-stop USCCB document on “Eucharistic coherence” with page after page of pious blather that a 2nd grader preparing for First Communion could summarize in a simple declarative sentence completely misses the point. Biden is a heretic and is already excommunicated latae sententiae. The bishops need to declare Biden’s excommunication formally and publicly and then proceed down the line from there. U.S. Catholics have had enough. Actions, not words, are what is demanded.
Problem is this action would not only apply to Biden. It would apply to millions of Catholics, who might stop coming to church and no longer financially supporting the church. Then the church could face a dilemma. How important is money?
Also this could lead to schism. Do we really want another of these? Maybe some do.
Valid points, but maybe a spiritual housecleaning is necessary at this point. Better to have a smaller, faithful Church than a morally and spiritually corrupted larger body.
At least those “millions of Catholics” will have ceased committing sacrilege by receiving Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin.
John 6:66
Great Expectations. Biden’s expectation [a shameless excerpt from a previous comment] has an imperious tone, solemnly urging the Church to desist from its faithful practice, refusing what’s owed him over a mere trifle, a predisposed approval of the murder of approx 70 million innocents since 1973. The president lives in a world bereft of “rules”, except his own, with license presumptuously due to separation of Church and State. He recently shouted, arms flailing, that he’s made far greater radical change to our Nation than any predecessor. Destructive changes to timeless moral doctrine on life, family, and sexuality. An infant in the womb is in greater danger during his administration than at any time in history. What’s at stake for the Church isn’t political expediency. Nor maintaining order and cohesion. Neither is separation of Church and State at issue. Rather it’s the foundation of a just society in which religious freedom and the right to uphold its values. Values that are the source of that foundation for justice.
“An infant in the womb is in greater danger during his administration than at any time in history.”
Well said.
I think we can have a pretty good idea of the bishops who supported going forward on the document, if we’ve been following this story. Several bishops have come forward, besides Cordileone and others who have been forthright thus far.
“Hope springs eternal . . .”
So are we going to deny communion to those Catholic politicians advocating the death penalty?
While on this path what about those who campaigned for sending US troops to Iraq?
Oh, please. Support for abortion, “gay marriage”, and trans-sexualism is different, in kind and degree, from prudential judgments re: capital punishment and national defense.
Oh, please, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with national defence. It was an act of un godly evil, in every respect it was a murderous pursuit! And one can argue that prudential judgements as applied to capitol punishment can also apply to the issue of Abortion. It is my personal position that I am against abortion, full stop. However to what degree or extent, in a democratic republic where there is the separation of church and state, can I insist that an other, who does not share my faith in Jesus, be beholden to a law that may be against the wishes of a voting majority who are non christian?
The answer you seek is no, because as the court of the Pontiff Francis has reluctantly implied by its “eloquent ambiguity,” (to quote one apologist) the death penalty cannot be declared immoral.
This is as compared to abortion, fornication, sodomy, false witness and idolatry, which, among other things, remain mortal sins.
I have no academic qualifications in Ethics unlike Mr Weigel but a quick look at the Wikipedia page on the subject states:
[ In ethics, a “prudential judgment” is one where the circumstances must be weighed to determine the correct action. Generally, it applies to situations where two people could weigh the circumstances differently and ethically come to different conclusions.
For instance, in the theory of just war, the government of a nation must weigh whether the harms they suffer are more than the harms that would be produced by their going to war against another nation that is harming them; the decision whether to go to war is therefore a prudential judgment.]
Mr Weigel, an author and academically qualified ethicist who has written extensively on the subject of Just War Theory was a signatory to the Project For a New American Centurary’s Statement of Principals, accompanied by the political elite of the Bush administration. His support for invasion of Iraq is on record, in effect a Catholic blessing of this act of war: https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/428/article/just-war-case-war
Why is Mr Weigle, a celebrated contributor of articles to CWR not the subject of serious discourse with respect to the sanctity of life?
One could mount an argument that he should be denied communion!
An ordinary and commonplace and “private thing,” says the hollow-suited and sleepwalking occupier of the White House…
When Hannah Arendt interviewed Adolf Eichmann, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews, she found him to be “quite ordinary, commonplace, and something neither demonic nor monstrous” (Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1964).
Biden has frequently said that he personally opposes abortion but that he “won’t impose his beliefs on anyone else”, or some such blather.
Mr. President – we’re not asking you to do that, we are merely asking you to DEFEND what you say your beliefs are, and there is NO sign that you have any intention to do so.