Diocese’s goal is to foster racial unity

One day I was having a conversation with my dad about growing up in Dallas.  He explained that his south Dallas neighborhood was made up of mainly Italian, Jewish and African American families.  He remembered that he mostly played on his own street, but often the children of the neighborhood would gather to play baseball at the neighborhood park. It’s just what children did back then.

He remembered one day, during a neighborhood baseball game, a policeman pulled up and called the white children over to his car.  The policeman told them they should not be playing with those Black children and they should have their own game.  My dad remarked that from that day on the way the neighborhood children played together changed a lot.   

At the end of May this year, with the death of Mr. George Floyd, the issues of race and equality in our country have once again caught our nation’s attention.  The voice of the African American community has been energized and encouraged to tell its story of what growing up and living in the United States is like for a Black American.

While others, who have lived outside of the African American experience, feel threatened by this unfamiliar description of life in America. They refuse to listen, calling the stories of the Black communities’ experience of inequality propaganda, or fake news. Maybe they don’t listen because they just want things to get back to normal.  This desire of the African community to be heard, and the resistance of others to listen, sets up a tragic scenario.  There needs to be a way to avoid an ever-deepening divide within our community.

The BUILDING BRIDGES: Racial Healing and Transformation special section in this edition of The Catholic Commentator is one step to help build bridges that will bring us together as one family in faith and community.  As Catholics, we know that our strongest bond is our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, who commands us to love one another.  We have all been baptized into this family of faith, and we are one in Christ.

But despite this profound unity in Christ, we do not know each other well.  We, as a church community, have not always taken time or provided opportunities for all the different voices, nationalities, races and ages of our Catholic family to be heard and become better known to us.  With this special section, we hope to foster greater unity and promote heartfelt conversation 

throughout our church and community by giving a place to the voices and stories of the African American Catholics of the Diocese of Baton Rouge.

Some parts of the story will make us proud, but others should move us to vow to work to rid our church of any injustice or lack of love that may remain.  Read these stories and articles so that a foundation for real conversation can begin.  As Catholics we should embrace these stories of faith not just as experiences of another person but as part of the common story we share as members of the Diocese of Baton Rouge.

I urge you to read with an open heart that desire to see and understand the African American experience from the point of view of people of color. We cannot listen with the “answer running.”  We should avoid the kind of defensive listening that, while the other person is talking, we are thinking about our clever comeback, a bit of wisdom or a defense of our position to expose how the other person is wrong.

Open heart listening is listening carefully to understand and believe what the person is telling us.  This is hard because what we learn from the other may mean that we need to change our perspective to include this new understanding.   This kind of open heart listening is also hard because it may reveal unexpectedly, to any of us, an unspoken, ugly assumption that we learned long ago, maybe on a baseball field, that still shapes a superior attitude which supports in some way an unchristian and possibly unjust judgment of others.

To listen this way is to carry out the command of Jesus to love one another.  This kind of listening is prompted by the Holy Spirit because it seeks the real truth by allowing others to tell us who they are rather than us telling them who we think they are. To really listen and allow our hearts to be touched by the joys, the pains, the aspirations and dreams of another person moves us to the kind of love and respect God wants us to have for everyone.

But this kind of conversation cannot happen until we know each other better.  It is our hope that this special section will build the first bridge to help us begin talking to one another so we can build a future where all feel welcomed, a future where our children will play together on the baseball fields because that is just what children do when no one tells them otherwise.