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Detroit archbishop: A missionary attitude can remedy the evils of racism

June 25, 2018 CNA Daily News 1

Detroit, Mich., Jun 25, 2018 / 02:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Amid recent ecclesial efforts to combat the problem of racism, Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit released a pastoral note last week confronting the “sin of racism,” saying a mission-centric attitude is the best remedy for the harms caused by discrimination.

“Our nation’s history has many tremendous accomplishments of which we should be proud. But it also bears the stain of many years of institutional racism whereby Blacks – even after emancipation – were treated as second-class citizens or worse,” said Archbishop Vigneron in his June 18 pastoral note “Agents for the New Creation”.

“Acts of racism are sins,” he continued, noting the Archdiocese of Detroit would be confronting racism by “recommitting ourselves to becoming a community of believers – a band of joyful missionary disciples – who affirm each person’s human dignity.”

According to Vigneron, acts of racism produce three evil fruits. First, he said, racial prejudices cause tremendous harm to whom they are directed, causing a deprivation “of his inherent human dignity” which questions their “God-given value.”

Secondly, Vigneron said racism can poison other minds through its reach, causing societal damage as it is transmitted to others.

Finally, it also causes “self-inflicted harm,” since the attitude of racism disfigures an individual’s “understanding of right and wrong and obscures his ability to see truth through the light of the Gospel.”

Vigneron said the Detroit archdiocese would focus on its commitment to “being radically mission-oriented” in an effort to fight the sin of racism.

“This means that our primary purpose for existing is to preach the Gospel,” Vigneron said, adding, “our mission is to proclaim the life-changing power of Jesus Christ.”

“The Gospel illuminates not just our relationship with God but also our relationship with others. All have been created in the image and likeness of God. Each person bears within himself the very image of God,” he continued.  

This misson-centric attitude, Vigneron said, means that Christ is the center of every action and that every life is entrusted to the providence of the Holy Spirit. Being transformed by the Holy Spirit, he continued, begins with each individual’s journey of repentance.

Unity in Christ “does not dissolve our differences,” he said. “Rather, it is the variety of gifts which Christ gives to the faithful through his Holy Spirit which makes his Bride, the Church, more able to reflect God’s goodness.”

The archbishop noted that as the Church has spread, “different customs and traditions consonant with the revealed faith and appropriate to local communities were developed. We see this richness expressed in the various liturgical rites which are present in our Eastern Churches.”

“The gifts of the African American faithful are a tremendous blessing to the Archdiocese of Detroit. We would be a much poorer Church without the expressions of faith through prayer, music, and personal testimony proper to the Black communities,” Vigneron said.

“And these expressions are a leaven to the Catholic Church. They are charisms which God has given to the whole Church through our African American brothers and sisters,” he continued.

The Detroit archbishop also said the only antidote to the evils of racism is Christ, and asked for the particular intercession of Blessed Solanus Casey, who was a “shining example” of how to treat others with dignity and love.

“As we seek to build a more just society – one in which we can truly say that racism has been defeated – we must begin, as Christians, with our personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” Vigneron said.

“To conclude, I particularly commend to you the memory of Blessed Solanus Casey,” Vigneron continued, encouraging his archdiocese to let Fr. Solanus “be for us still a powerful intercessor to obtain the grace from on high that we need to be agents for healing wounds of racism in our community, and to be agents of the new creation in Christ.”

Vigneron’s comments come amid recent efforts within the Church in the US to oppose racism.

The archbishop is a member of the USCCB’s ad hoc committee against racism, which was announced in August 2017 in the wake of rising racial tensions, for the purpose of promoting education, resources, communications strategies and care for victims of racism.

The committee’s chair, Bishop Shelton Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, said earlier this month at the US bishops’ spring general assembly that their work is on schedule, and a draft of a pastoral letter should be presented at the autumn general assembly held in November.

The US bishops also listened to a presentation about racism by Bryan Stevenson at their spring general assembly. Stevenson is a lawyer and the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization which advocates for equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

A fellow US archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, has also written a pastoral letter on racism recently.

“The Challenge of Racism Today” was published by Cardinal Wuerl in 2017. In the pastoral letter, he wrote that “Intolerance and racism will not go away without a concerted awareness and effort on everyone’s part. Regularly we must renew the commitment to drive it out of our hearts, our lives and our community.”

Both Cardinal Wuerl’s pastoral letter and Archbishop Vigneron’s pastoral note were fruits of diocesan synods.

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Tennessee parish responds to immigration raid with support, prayer

June 25, 2018 CNA Daily News 3

Knoxville, Tenn., Jun 25, 2018 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The April day nearly 100 workers were taken into custody in the country’s largest worksite immigration raid in a decade, St. Patrick’s parish center in Morristown, Tenn. opened to the community and donations started pouring in.

The parish center stayed open until 3 a.m. the night of April 5. Husbands, wives and children gathered together, trying to find out what had happened to their relatives and community members, waiting as 43 of the 97 people in custody were eventually released back to their families.

In the days following, donations of food, clothing, toiletries, and money poured in to the parish.

“We had a lot, I mean a surplus of things. We were running out of room, we had to move things down to the [church] basement,” Veronica Galvan told CNA.

The director of religious education at St. Patrick and a resident of Morristown for 23 years, Galvan was well-known in the community, located about 45 miles northeast of Knoxville, and the first to ask the pastor, Fr. Patrick Brownell, to open the church the day of the raid.

“I just went ahead and told people to go there if they didn’t feel safe at home or work,” she said. “They expressed that fear and I wanted to make sure that was taken care of and they could feel safe somewhere. So we opened up the doors to whoever wanted to come.”

For the first two weeks the center “was crazy,” she said. Every day, more than 200 people who had been affected, either directly or indirectly, gathered at the parish. More than 100 volunteers came and went throughout the day from around the wider community, including lawyers, doctors, priests, and other religious ministers.

Three religious sisters originally from Mexico also came to help and to pray with people, Fr. Brownell said.

Quickly, they ran out of space for physical items and had to ask people to give only money. In most of the cases, those in police custody following the raid were the primary or only breadwinners of their families, and people needed help just to continue to pay their bills.

Galvan said with the money they received they paid the families’ bills for two months. With the more than $50,000 received through a GoFundMe campaign set up by local Hispanic and Latino aid group H.O.L.A. Lakeway, $1,000 was given to each worker to go toward their bond.

A prayer vigil was held in the community April 9 and Fr. Brownell has left the church accessible at night via a door code, so that if anyone wants to go the church to pray at night they can.

Now, two and half months later, things feel like they have returned to normal, St. Patrick’s youth ministry coordinator, Colleen Jacobs, told CNA: “I think there is some good to that, but as a community I think we should still feel more outrage than we do right now. I myself feel like, should I be doing something? What should I be doing right now?”

As of June 13, 35 of the 54 people taken out of state and held in an immigration detention facility have been released on bond and are back with their families.

But as they await court dates and a lengthy legal process which could result in deportation, they are not legally allowed to work or drive. And the money the community and St. Patrick’s raised has run out.

This is one of the purposes of a weekly meeting still taking place at the church. A group of those affected created the meeting for additional support and training on things like driving and paying bills, for those who had relied on detained family members for these tasks.

Other organizations, including Catholic Charities of East Tennessee, are working to ensure workers have access to legal counsel and help with their court cases.

Though it is unknown exactly whom taken in the raid was a member of St. Patrick and St. John Paul II mission church in nearby Rutledge (names are kept as private as possible for security), there were certainly Catholics among them, Fr. Alex Waraksa said.

The assisting priest for Hispanic ministry in Morristown, who also assists at four other area churches, he was present to speak with people at the parish center following the raid.

It was “a place to be during the day and get different types of support,” including prayer, he said.

In some cases, church records on sacraments can help workers in their legal case because it provides a record of the depth and length of their ties to the community, Waraksa said. Unfortunately, there have been godparents and parents who, detained, have missed seeing their children receive the sacraments.

St. Patrick has tried to reach out to youth, too, following the raid. Wednesdays the church hosts youth nights for middle and high schoolers, with usual attendance at about 160 students, about half Hispanic, half non-Hispanic, Jacobs said, noting that it is a lot for a town of not many Catholics.

Morristown’s population is around 30,000,  with around 900 families attending St. Patrick, though Waraksa said some families may bounce among the areas’ Catholic churches for Mass.

Jacobs was nervous that the students would not show up for youth group the week following the raid, though. The fear had been so strong the first few days afterward, not only did many people not go to work, Fr. Waraksa said, 500-600 students didn’t show up at school.

Regardless, Jacobs and others worked with a community organizer from a neighboring town to host an evening on community activism and how to enact change.

That night not only did most of the students show up, the usual 30-40 adult leaders were accompanied by another 35-40 counselors from the local schools and healthcare systems.

“The youth could see that there was an outpouring of love from all the adults, from all different types of organizations across the community,” Jacobs said, “so that was really powerful in itself.”

They created small groups that allowed the kids to talk about their feelings, and Jacobs noted the trauma not only for kids who had parents and other relatives taken, but also for the kids whose friends and classmates had been affected.

“It’s kind of hard to explain [the raid] to a kid when you’re trying to teach them the values of love of neighbor and… to accept people no matter their skin color, or what their background is, [and] then you have adults doing the exact opposite,” she said.

Though the overall responses from the churches in Morristown and Rutledge were positive, St. Patrick’s pastor, Fr. Brownell, said not all the voices were united on the issue.

He said if you take the non-Hispanic part of their community, “many of them are split down the center [on immigration], very much like the rest of the nation.” The criticism he heard was only from a small number of people, though those few were vocal, he noted.

Jacobs said she thinks prayer is important, and that it is something they are trying to let the kids know: “Even though we know what is going on isn’t right, we can do as much as we can and then remember to keep everyone in your prayers.”

“What the… fallout is going to be I don’t know, but it’s really, really tough.”

Unfortunately, the Morristown Hispanic community faced another tragedy, when two teens from Guatemala were found to have drowned in a local lake June 19. Fr. Brownell and other staff members of St. Patrick worked to help organize the joint funeral this week.

“Right now, I think the community is a bit numb, the Hispanic community,” Brownell said, “because they don’t know where things are going.”

Most are with their families, “and that’s a good thing. But I can only imagine that it’s a depressing situation… not knowing what the outcome will be… and there’s a good chance the outcome will be deportation. So it’s sort of biding time.”

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