Catholic bishops’ anti-racism statements failed to reach ordinary parishioners in any sermon

Evidence

At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the statement in 2004, the bishops again conducted a survey to assess its impact. They found that only 18 percent of US bishops had issued statements condemning racism as a sin. Moreover, Bryan Massingale, a priest and author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, notes that “most of these statements were written by only a handful of bishops” and that few move beyond personal attitudes to deal with systemic racism. Most tellingly, the study found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Catholics reported that they had not heard a single sermon on racism or racial justice over the entire three-year cycle of the lectionary. In other words, even while working through the entire text of the Bible over that period, the overwhelming majority of priests did not find a single occasion to preach on racial justice issues. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 206

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter 1’s argument (cited in text) that white Christian resistance happened in the North too, and to the broader white-church-resistance thesis running through this book. — connects to: Repeated Catholic episcopal statements against racism over thirty years changed little. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 204; The Catholic bishops’ 1979 anti-racism pastoral made almost no impact. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 205