Testimonial from a Black Catholic

Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow, and a reader has submitted a testimonial to share on the blog regarding the experience as a black Catholic involved with the traditional liturgy, and some of the conflict and sense of cultural alienation involved:

First, some background information. Until last May, I went to an FSSP parish in Mableton, Georgia. I had been going there for three years. Currently, I'm going to my local parish, which is comprised of blacks and Hispanics in roughly equal numbers. The reason why I left was not because I thought that the Novus Ordo is superior (I don't) or because I enjoy the works of Marty Haugen (I don't). To sum up briefly, a bunch of parishioners didn't like this one priest, so they ganged up on him and falsely accused him of every sin imaginable. The secular and religious authorities had to get involved (including the ones in Rome), and the priest ended up resigning from the parish, but was cleared of all charges. Because I believed the priest in question was innocent, this other faction of parishioners ostracized me and wouldn't let their children attend the CCD classes I was teaching. The other faction was also supportive of the SSPX, which I could care less about were it not for the fact that they didn't trust all of the people outside their clique. Aside from the factional disputes, there was also the feeling of cultural alienation. I can't testify to the way traditionalism is in other parts of the world or even other parts of the US, but at the parish I attended the whole neo-Confederacy thing was pretty blatant. In this case, it probably has to do with a pre-existing regional disposition to that kind of ideology. Maybe I should have gotten the clue when the French priest we had when I first started going had a Confederate flag on his car. Apparently, the guy must have been a hard-core monarchist and bought the crap about the South being the only place that traditional Catholicism could have flourished (except that it didn't. Oops).

Another issue I have is over the collective mental explosion of the trads/neo-cons over Obama. In the black community, the Obama candidacy was treated like the natural teleological outcome of more then 400 years of struggle, some thing that I was clearly on the outside of (I did a write-in candidate, because I didn't want to vote for either). Much of the enthusiasm comes from the feeling that the Obama presidency means an end of the feeling of being a metic. The term metic comes from Ancient Athens. Metics were people who were residents of Athens, but not citizens. Many of them had lived in the city-state for many generations, but were still considered foreigners. This has been the traditional situation of blacks in this country; always residents, never citizens. When Obama won the election I thought, "Wow, we've finally made it" and then I felt guilty because of his pro-abortion record and that feeling hasn't left me since. The whole election filled me with a great deal of anxiety, since I was told by my mother that if I didn't vote for Obama then there would be race riots and blacks would be even worse off than they were in the post-Reconstruction era. Then all of these Catholic blogs and writers were saying that if Obama was elected, then it would usher in a Nazi-type government (which was also what my mom said. Strange how Hitler always wins no matter who wins). he crux is the problem is the phenomenon known as "double consciousness" as described by WEB Du Bois in his book The Souls of Black Folk. It refers to an inability to reconcile the twin identities of being black and American, or in this case, it is the difficulties of reconcile black and Catholic identities.

Another example is the annual Catholic blogosphere two minutes of hate about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that seems to occur during the King Holiday. I've noticed that there seems to be some confusion on the part of many trads/neo-cons as to why black people idolize Dr. King. I would think that it would be obvious, but apparently not. One blog that I recalled reading some years ago complained that black Catholics should be trying to emulate the saints and not some cryto-socialist heretic. Unfortunately, there is no Catholic version of Dr. King or any of the other figures who people black American history. For example, when Coretta Scott King died almost four years ago, there were public masses said in her honor at predominantly black Catholic parishes in the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Is this against the rubrics? Possibly, but I really can't complain about that. FYI, Coretta Scott King lived the bulk of her adult life in the same house MLK bought for her in 1962. The house itself is located in an Atlanta slum called Vine City, one of the worst parts of town. She was actually burglarized a number of times, including once by a man who killed several other elderly women in the area (when he saw the identity of his newest would-be victim, he fled, showing even criminals respect the Kings). When I think of that, it's apparent to me that Mrs. King honestly cared about the poor blacks in a way that I really can't say about any of the Catholic "cultural warriors" whom I'm supposed to pledge allegiance. I can't just act that the black Protestant church is the "work of Satan" because frankly they've done more for me in many religious, material, and political senses. This isn't a part of my history that I can junk simply because it doesn't fit into the Euro-centrist triumphalism espoused by so many trads/neo-cons. Since American black culture stems in some form or another from the black Protestant church, I wonder if this means then that the entire cultural output of blacks is totally worthless then? It's a terrifying thing to contemplate.

Part of the problem is that the Catholic Church didn't invest much time or energy trying to evangelize or support the interests of America's black population. The Catholic Church was uninterested in the abolitionist movement, because the French priests that were staffing many American parishes at the time equated abolitionism with modernism and Protestantism. It wasn't unusual for priests to inform on slaves who were planning to escape, even if it involved breaking the seal of confession (see Catholics in the Old South by Randall M. Miller for more on this topic). Since the "Black Church" was/is the only wholly black owned institution in America, quite a few blacks who were raised Catholic under slavery converted to Protestantism so they could have control of their own affairs. This is why I think that it’s a mistake to use rhetoric that equates slavery and abortion, since it’s pretty easy to call out the Church’s less than stellar response to the former and claim hypocrisy. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1960s that many Catholic parishes in the North and South became desegregated. In many parishes, blacks had to sit in the back and take communion last - if they were even allowed to enter the building in the first place. As a rule, disenfranchisement makes a poor evangelization tactic. So if you believe that the Catholic Church is the True Church, then the effects of slavery have condemned more than 28 million people to a life of heresy. During my travels on the Catholic blogosphere in particular and the Catholic media in general, I've noticed a failure to acknowledge to black Catholics even exist. For example, writer E. Michael Jones wrote in his book, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement (intended to end discrimination against blacks in housing, jobs, and education in Northern slums) was a "liberal plot" to eradicate white ethnic Catholics, conveniently ignoring/forgetting that Chicago contains one of the largest black Catholic communities in the country.

There is an essay by James Baldwin entitled Stranger in the Village that details his experiences in a small Swiss village where he is the only black person that the townsfolk have ever seen. He mentions at one point that these Swiss people have a connection to Western culture that he will never have:

"For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartes says something to them which it cannot say to me..."

When I read that, I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut, because it was/is true. American blacks occupy an odd niche in history, as the "Bastards of Western Civilization," not fully African, but not totally Western. When an American black goes to, say, Ghana, he or she is referred to as obruni or "white foreigner." Despite the best hopes of blacks to find their roots in Africa, many Africans tend not to see a connection with their American cohorts. Meanwhile, current trad/neocon discourse states there is no place in the canon for blacks, not even for a Fredrick Douglass or an Booker T. Washington. Black history, even if a conservative take is being used, is inherently subversive, because it challenges this notion of Manifest Destiny, White Man's BurdenBlack Athena hypothesis or anything like that, but I don't want to be insulted all day either. I may prefer Gregorian chant to gospel music, but I don't want the latter to be written off as heretical "jungle music." Since the percentage of Europeans who comprise the Catholic Church is getting smaller and smaller, I think these issues are going to take on ever more importance. I don't know if any of these things make sense to you or are helpful, but this is part of my take on the situation.

-Leah

I think these are issues that shouldn't be simply dismissed or ignored by the mainstream Church or traditionalist movement.

We will see what is said of MLK in the Catholic Blogosphere tomorrow. In some ways it seems to be the anti-Columbus Day for a lot of trads. Columbus Day is all glorified (despite the fact that it is clearly not so much a celebration of the figure of Columbus himself as an individual, but of the morally tarnished event of white colonization of the New World), whereas Martin Luther King Day is dismissed or belittled and his own person attacked (despite the fact that it is not so much about celebration of the man in his private life, but of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement).

But, as Leah describes, important figures of black history are excluded from even the secular American historical canon by trads and conservatives (sometimes having the gall to claim it's only because they are "non-Catholic")...in a way they would never exclude important non-Catholic white figures such as the Founding Fathers.

Though, in either case, we do need to recognize the difference between recognizing important historical, or intellectual, or political achievements for a given community on a temporal level, and going to such silly extremes as making them Saints, ala this now infamous picture, which probably just causes more backlash from conservatives and trads:
http://revcrystalk.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/mlk-icon.jpg

I've discussed the issue of Euro-centrism and the "Western Civilization" meta-narrative among trads and conservatives, and this seeming expectation that non-Europeans should conform to a neo-colonialist, culture-cringe mentality in general in my post on Globalism.

Though I'm white, one of my complaints about a lot of the untraditional stuff that goes on in our churches...is that it's still so unambiguously white.

For example, while traditional chant is the appropriate music for liturgy, I really like gospel. If the non-traditional music they were using was really emotional, clapping-and-jumping gospel music or black Spirituals...I could at least be touched by that emotionally. Because there is a real history of suffering and struggle behind it, a real pathos. I might be tempted to get behind something like that, it really is organic.

But that's not what they use. For some reason, that is looked upon as inappropriate for unspecified (and, I suspect, subconsciously racist) reasons...even when totally corny (and totally white) "Christian Rock" is seen as okay for "contemporary" Masses. Anyone seen the South Park episode about "Faith+1"? We have a contemporary choir in my area, and the music really is that bad, that sappy, that pathetic, that cringe-worthy. And yet, its apologists will tell you, it is okay because "the Church can adapt to any appropriate style". Yet, recommend music something like the following video as an at least better alternative if they refuse to use chant and want something "lively," and suddenly those same Guitar Mass people will scowl at you and say, "Well, of course that's inappropriate," and the only distinction I can see is because it's black, and in many Catholics mind, that's just not "who we are." Even when "On Eagle's Wings" (or "Jesus Baby") apparently is...



It's one of those things that survived Vatican II that makes you really question their priorities. Just like mandatory celibacy, this very white mentality...was kept, even as they destroyed the traditional liturgy and started being ambiguous about the One True Faith in a pluralist way. The traditional Roman Rite, at least, does have some organic connection to Europeans, of course, given that it is the Rite of a specific place that does happen to be European. So a certain white identity among white devotees is perhaps to be expected there. But it is, bizarrely, maintained even in the Novus Ordo milieu, even though that was meant to be a sort of "United Nations Liturgy" from what I can tell. A quote from Arturo Vasquez's amazing blog Reditus describes this better than I:

I suppose this is one of my beefs with apologetics-driven, American conservative Catholicism: it packages Catholicism into a highly marketable, very sensible, very bland, and let’s face it, very American product. In what is easy for Americans to grasp (practical questions and trivia), it brings them up, and in the education in the Catholic ethos (i.e. all the cool stuff), it leaves them right where they are: in the atmosphere of the suburban strip-mall.

An atmosphere that is, of course, quintessentially white. White American without even any of the organic connection to European history that it is implicit in the traditional Roman Rite.

This Euro-centrism, this implicit pressure for non-whites to assimilate culturally or else be branded as not "true" Catholics...is something we need to deconstruct.