My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
It has been said that our ‘original sin’ as citizens of this land of freedom and opportunity was the institution of slavery. It is virtually inconceivable in the 21st Century for us to envision sisters and brothers in the human family to have been treated as property, bought and sold, families separated, all for profit. It is shameful to think that even our founding ancestors who wrote and signed our Declaration of Independence that boldly proclaimed that all men are created equal were deceptively disingenuous as many, themselves, held in slavish bondage men, women and children as mere chattel.
It took a Civil War and the inspired and courageous boldness of one of our greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, to break this chain of bondage in his historic Emancipation Proclamation. Yet even after so many deaths and with the law of the land freeing our sisters and brothers previously held in bondage, the sin of racism was sadly hard wired into the psyche of many. From Jim Crow to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to present day voter disenfranchisement, the sad remnants of America’s original sin continue to shadow the bright promise of this Land.
Shamefully, the Catholic Church in our land was never completely freed from the taint of this sin. From Jesuits owning slaves, segregation of ‘colored’ parishes, to refusing to admit ‘coloreds’ to seminaries and convents, no wonder the evangelization of our African American brothers and sisters into the Catholic Church was so anemic.
While there were some glorious exceptions to this sad and all to often repeated pattern of racism, by and large the American Catholic Church and her leadership were followers rather than leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in our Country. Sadly, the doctrine of the Church that proclaimed the inherent dignity of all the members of God’s family, was often filtered through the eyes of prejudice and racism.
In the over 46 years of priesthood and celebrating the Sacrament of Penance, I can sadly count on, maybe, on both hands, the times when individuals confessed the sin of racism and prejudice toward their neighbor. It seems that sins ‘between navel and knees’ gain the prize for the most confessed sins in our often-myopic moral vision. This reality is despite the clarity of the Lord’s continuing call to reverence the dignity of our neighbor, whether it was the despised Samaritan, tax collector, leper, thief or prostitute. Jesus saw through the prejudices of his time and every age to the dignity of a child of God worthy of his Father’s unconditional love and mercy.
No wonder, then, that we hear in our Gospel today the Lord’s challenging message of showing no partiality as we reverence the dignity of all God’s children. Let us pray for the courage to take up that challenge daily.