By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

On April 4, the 33rd anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal George released a new pastoral letter on racism exhorting the faithful in the Archdiocese of Chicago to work to eliminate the sin of racism.

“Its purpose is to draw people’s attention to the sin of racism, which is pervasive in our communities,” said Cardinal George of “Dwell in My Love: A Pastoral Letter on Racism.”

	The cover of “Dwell in My Love: A Pastoral Letter on Racism,” released April 4.

Daughters of the Heart of Mary Sister Anita Baird, who heads the archdiocese’s Office for Racial Justice, said the publication marks a “prophetic moment” at the beginning of the third Christian millennium, at a time when U.S. society is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse than ever.

“We have to get this right, or we will perish,” Baird said. “Look at the census figures. We as a nation are going to look different.”

The letter follows “Moving Beyond Racism: Learning to See with the Eyes of Christ,” a pastoral letter on racism released April 4, 2000, by all of the Illinois bishops, including the cardinal.

“Dwell in My Love” is longer and more specific to the Archdiocese of Chicago. Its impetus was the beating of Lenard Clark, and the archdiocese’s Task Force on Race, which was formed by Auxiliary Bishop Raymond Goedert in the aftermath of that incident, the cardinal said.

The task force suggested addressing the issue in a pastoral letter, Cardinal George said, although a letter will not solve the problem.

“It’s easier to write a letter than to change attitudes,” he said.

The letter discusses the history of the Chicago area, where ethnic parishes created a sense of community and support, but too often turned into “parish fortresses,” designed to keep others out.

“We have had a history of segregated neighborhoods,” Cardinal George said. “It’s less true now than it was when I was growing up.”

When the cardinal was a boy, he lived on the Northwest Side. He didn’t become aware of racism, he wrote, until he spent a summer in Tennessee. Upon his return, he realized that his own neighborhood did not include African-American families, and that while his parents had African-American acquaintances, they did not socialize with them.

“The teaching in my home and in my parish was good; the experience just didn’t match the teaching,” Cardinal George wrote. “That gap is called ‘sin,’ sometimes personal and social, sometimes institutional and structural, and sometimes all of these.”

Since that time, there has been much progress, the cardinal said.

“There are some real changes in attitude, sometimes to good effect, sometimes to troubling effect,” he said. “I think people now take it for granted that racism is wrong and that wasn’t always the case.”

The sin of racism still exists in people’s hearts and in institutional practices that make it difficult, if not impossible, for people of different races to find affordable housing or get financing for homes in some neighborhoods.

Such practices have their roots in the history of the Great Migration of Southern African Americans into Chicago, where they were confined to a few neighborhoods, and the ensuing decades, where some neighborhoods “changed” virtually overnight with the help of fear-mongering real estate brokers hoping to turn quick profits.

While some parishes may have discouraged people of different races from becoming part of their communities, the church teaching has always been clear, Baird said.

“The teachings of the church have never varied on this,” she said. “Individual pastors and parishes have. But we have to stand on what we know has always been right.

“We cannot hate anyone and say we love God. That is very, very clear.”

The letter continues the church’s commitment to oppose racism, and it recalls the men and women of all races who stood up to oppose racism in the past.

“I’m building on what is a very difficult history, and what is at the same time a very comforting history,” Cardinal George said.

The cardinal mentioned the parish workshops on race that have been conducted by Father Thomas Swade since 1997. The workshops bring people from different parishes together to confront their own experience of racism.

“The church has been addressing racism,” said Sheila Adams, director of African-American Ministry for the archdiocese. “But racism is like an onion. You keep peeling off layers and peeling off layers, and there’s still millions of layers yet to go.”

“The bishops’ conference wrote their first pastoral on the sin of racism in 1979,” Baird said. “It was like the best-kept secret in the world. I think individually, there have always been those that have spoken up.”

Teaching young people to speak up against racism is the focus of Catholic Schools Opposing Racism (COR), a four-year-old effort to bring high school students of different races together.

Suzanne Wille, the Queen of Peace High School teacher who has coordinated the effort since 1998, said that the battle against racism now must root out underlying attitudes.

“Racism has kind of gone underground,” she said. “In the ’60s, there were really tangible things to fight against. Now it’s more subtle. How do you talk about institutional racism to teenagers? That’s a real complicated topic. How do you talk about redlining to kids who barely understand what a mortgage is?”

Father Lawrence Dowling, pastor of St. Denis Parish on the Southwest Side, applauded the letter because it is the first pastoral document he has read that addresses the idea of “white privilege.”

“It’s just something that has got to be faced,” said Dowling, whose parish is dealing with many of the issues discussed in the letter. In the last 10 years, the parish has gone from 2 or 3 percent African-American to about 45 percent African-American.

“He does a great job of laying it out, with the historical, scriptural analysis,” said Dowling, one of the priests who was asked to read and comment on the letter before its publication. “I also think the recommendations at the end are right on target.”

Continuing efforts such as COR and the workshops on race are among the dozens of action steps outlined at the end of the pastoral letter. The steps include measures that can be taken as part of the liturgy of the church and measures that can be taken by the archdiocese, by parishes, by schools and community members.

“How do we love God and love our neighbor? It’s by doing all these action steps,” said William Purcell, director of the archdiocesan Office for Peace and Racial Justice. “A lot of it isn’t new stuff. It’s stuff we’ve been doing for a while. But what we wanted to do was have something anyone can do. Any Catholic can be involved, because racism is a personal and social sin.”