69 Million Catholics in America

[Guest]

Like a Saint that we can trust to help to carry us through

Black Jesus, hahaha

He's like a Saint that we can trust to help to carry us through

Black Jesus

[dUSt]

Only 3% black...

Also read from a Catholic source that blacks couldn't receive Communion back in the day. Sicking.

Where did you get this information?

I'll be the honest one of the main temptations to leave the Catholic Church has been this issue. It's always been very apparent to me that this is a big issue that people try to sweep under the rug. This is why certain Catholics make me want to knock their head off when they go on and on about how Non Catholics (aka 97% of Black Christians) realllyy aren't Christians when we get real technical about it. If we just go back to Vatican 1 etc etc....Although all the recent anti Catholic stuff I've seen with the Pope's visit has sorta canceled those feelings out for me a little bit for the time being at least. There's people guilty on both sides. Although to be fair most of the anti Catholic stuff I see is from lunatic white people.

Why would you leave the church for something the Church didn't even teach? That's like saying you would leave the Church because of all the Catholics who are pro-abortion. It is not the Church telling them to be pro-abortion--so why fault the Church for that?

[Guest]

Pope Francis And Black Lives Matter: For African-Americans, Pope US Visit Puts Focus On Social Justice And Racial Disparity

 

By Aaron Morrison @aaronlmorrisonon September 25 2015 7:35 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- Harlem's barbershops, beauty salons, sneaker stores and even the liquor market advertising premium spirits are all familiar to Valerie Massard, an African-American woman who has lived for 47 years in the historic black neighborhood. But Roman Catholicism isn’t.

 

“This is history for me and my daughter,” she said Friday as she joined hundreds of black and brown faces along an upper Manhattan street reserved for Pope Francis’ motorcade Friday. Massard, a Baptist, had gathered with others to see the pope visit a Catholic elementary school during his whirlwind tour of New York City. “To me, he’s a Christian and he was chosen by God to be a messenger for Christ,” she said, adding that the pontiff was appealing to many black Americans because "he's opening up and showing that things need to change to help all of the people, not just some of them."

 

Pope Francis' visit to Our Lady Queen of Angels School in Harlem, just a few blocks east of Malcolm X Boulevard, named after the Black Muslim icon and human rights activist who was assassinated in 1965, during the African-American civil rights movement, represented another step in the growing relationship between the Catholic Church and the African-American community in the U.S.

 

While blacks make up a sliver of the nation's Catholic population, some of the faith’s African-American leaders and adherents said the pope’s message on injustice and inequality was an implicit admonishment that blacks had not yet achieved true social and economic parity with their white counterparts. The pope’s repeated mentions of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. this week during his first trip to the United States was an affirmation of what social justice activists have said for most of the year leading up to his visit -- that black lives matter and deserve equal access to the American dream, said some black Catholics.

 

“I think the pope has already communicated that the voices of the locked out and the left out should be listened to,” said Marc Morial, a lifelong Catholic who is president and CEO of the National Urban League, a black civil rights organization based in New York City. “That’s what the Black Lives Matter movement has been about,” he said, referring to the national social justice movement that first emerged in 2013 as a Twitter hashtag campaign protesting police brutality.

 

Morial, who was among civil rights leaders invited to the state arrival ceremony for Francis at the White House on Wednesday, said it was most important that the Catholic Church’s U.S. bishops and priests take to heart Francis’ message of social justice advocacy as a charge for all Catholics.

 

“I don’t expect that [the pope] will go through a checklist of every nuance and political issue,” Morial said by phone Thursday from Washington, D.C. “But are [church leaders] listening and hearing the pope on social justice, and what does that mean going forward?”

 

The pope is in the middle of a six-day, historic visit to the northeastern United States, where his plans included stops in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia -- major cities with sizable black and Latino populations. Income inequality, the environment, religious freedom and acceptance of immigrants have been themes in his remarks to national and global leaders in Washington, D.C., the United Nations and New York City. Finding solutions to racial disparity is a responsibility of clergy and lawmakers alike, the pope said.

 

“If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance,” Francis said Thursday to members of the U.S. Congress. Politics should be “an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good,” the pope continued. He added: “I do not underestimate the difficulty that this involves, but I encourage you in this effort.”

 

During two separate speeches in Washington, the pope evoked the legacy of King, the Protestant civil rights leader whose campaign for full civil and political rights for African-Americans helped the country dream of a better future. “That dream continues to inspire us all,” Francis told Congress.

 

But one day earlier, he acknowledged that the nation had not reached the symbolic mountaintop that King once preached about. “To use a telling phrase of the Rev. Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note, and now is the time to honor it,” the pope said Wednesday at the White House.

 

Black leaders across the nation said they found the pontiff's theme of civil rights inspiring. Bishop Shelton Fabre of the Houma-Thibodaux diocese, just outside New Orleans, attended Francis’ address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Thursday. The pope’s message on social justice could not have been any clearer, he said Friday by phone from Schriever, Louisiana.

 

“The pope would remind us that when we put our hearts and minds together as sisters and brothers in the Lord, we have done well by minority communities,” said Fabre, who is also chairman of the subcommittee on African-American affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Together, we can do wonderful things for God,” he added, quoting the words of the Catholic missionary, Mother Teresa.

 

There were more than 69 million Catholics in the U.S. in 2013, according to the National Catholic Education Association. But only 3 percent of U.S. Catholics are black, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of religious affiliation data.

 

Although Catholicism is among the most racially diverse faith groups in America, it has that distinction thanks to a sizable Hispanic minority. The two largest historically black Protestant Christian denominations, the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, have almost exclusively black members, the Pew Research Center’s analysis found.

 

Those faith traditions lent the voices of King, who was a Baptist minister, and activist Rosa Parks, who was a member of the AME church, to the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But black Catholics were not absent from the movement, said the Rev. Maurice Nutt, director of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans.

 

Black Catholics participated in the King-led march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965 and the anti-poverty March on Washington in 1963, Nutt said Thursday by phone from New York City. “We serve a God who is a God of justice and who hears the cries of the poor,” he said.

 

The African-American unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in August, more than double the 4.4 rate for whites. For black Americans, who make up about 13 percent of the country’s 318 million residents, income and wealth have been stagnant as the U.S. economy recovered from the recession of 2007-09, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. White families on average had seven times the wealth of African-American families, according to a recent study by the Urban Institute, an economic policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. In addition to an income and wealth gap, social justice activists have decried healthcare and criminal justice disparities between black and white Americans.

 

The recent civil unrest and protests over police-involved deaths in the majority-black cities of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore have prompted a Black Lives Matter symposium at Xavier University, scheduled for early November. The Catholic Church missed many opportunities to evangelize the African-American community and has not always gone out of its way to learn black history and culture, Nutt said.

 

“If we value life and see it as holy and sacred, then we must seek to save all lives and protect the most vulnerable and innocent in our communities,” said Nutt, a Redemptorist priest for more than 25 years. “This would include black-on-black murders in our urban communities, as well as the unwarranted murders of unarmed black people [by police].”

 

A crowd in Harlem let out a collective groan Friday when two large city sanitation trucks pulled in front of them, blocking their view of the street the pontiff was on. Some were not able to see Francis on his first pass at the Our Lady Queen of Angels School, but 26-year-old Michelle Darden did.

 

“I never got to see [Popes] John Paul or Benedict,” said the lifelong black Catholic who traveled from New Jersey and waited two hours along police barricades. “I can relate to him [Francis] because he’s putting himself out there” as a man of the people who seems aware of the issues important to black Americans, she added.

 

Darden and her friend, Danielle Burger, a 27-year-old black Catholic and fellow New Jerseyan, said they'd follow the pope to his next and final stop in Philadelphia, where he was expected to visit a prison and hold Mass on Saturday for thousands at the World Meeting of Families. “I love his message about volunteering,” Burger said, referring to Francis’ visit with poor and homeless residents of Washington, D.C. “He’s showing others how to be Christ-like.”

 

Darden and Burger left the area before Francis’ motorcade rounded the corner away from the school. This time, nearly everyone got a glimpse of the pope smiling and waving from his Fiat. In the diverse crowd of black, white and Latino New Yorkers, there were very few dry eyes.

 

 

Where did you get this information?

Why would you leave the church for something the Church didn't even teach? That's like saying you would leave the Church because of all the Catholics who are pro-abortion. It is not the Church telling them to be pro-abortion--so why fault the Church for that?

Info was from the two articles I posted. I was just saying that issue has been temptation.One I'm not going to give into. Although I do think it's a big issue that people pretend doesn't exist.

 

Edited September 27, 2015 by Guest

[vee]

Well Josh get out there and start preaching!  You want certain demographic numbers to go up so get to work!

[dominicansoul]

Josh, it's really sad that many Catholics back then went along with the status quo just as many do today's issues without any thought to Church teaching.  Nothing new under the sun, but if you are going to abandon Jesus over the sinners in our church, I think that's a problem.  

 

I second what what vee said...  Pope Francis said today we lay people need to do our part... 

[Basilisa Marie]

 Josh, have you read about St. Martin de Porres? He's an incredible saint who experienced so much bigotry during his life from members of the Church and his own religious community. So much of what he experienced was wrong, but he's a saint of heroic charity and humility. Plus he's a sass-master.  

When an epidemic struck Lima, there were in this single Convent of the Rosary 60 friars who were sick, many of them novices in a distant and locked section of the convent, separated from the professed. Martin is said to have passed through the locked doors to care for them, a phenomenon which was reported in the residence more than once. The professed, too, saw him suddenly beside them without the doors having been opened. Martin continued to transport the sick to the convent until the provincial superior, alarmed by the contagion threatening the friars, forbade him to continue to do so. His sister, who lived in the country, offered her house to lodge those whom the residence of the religious could not hold. One day he found on the street a poor Indian, bleeding to death from a dagger wound, and took him to his own room until he could transport him to his sister’s hospice. The prior, when he heard of this, reprimanded him for disobedience. He was extremely edified, however, by his reply: "Forgive my error, and please instruct me, for I did not know that the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity." The prior gave him liberty thereafter to follow his inspirations in the exercise of mercy.

[vee]

I love that story about St Martin, especially as it has one of my all time fav quotes from anyone ever

Ive read about Venerable Pierre Toussaint and really enjoyed his story.  Its been a while but I dont remember him seeming that sassy but incredibly charitable and humble.

He also gets the award for best Catholic mutton chops IMO

[Guest]

Where did you get this information?

Why would you leave the church for something the Church didn't even teach? That's like saying you would leave the Church because of all the Catholics who are pro-abortion. It is not the Church telling them to be pro-abortion--so why fault the Church for that?

This got merged with my other post. I will post it again...................Info was from the two articles I posted. I was just saying that issue has been temptation.One I'm not going to give into. Although I do think it's a big issue that people pretend doesn't exist.

Well Josh get out there and start preaching!  You want certain demographic numbers to go up so get to work!

We're already making moves boo boo

 

Edited September 27, 2015 by Guest

[NadaTeTurbe]

Catholicism in America was very deeply an immigrant phenomenon...as people started coming from Europe in the 1900s, they created a unique Catholic identity in America. Blacks were in America long before that, and American culture is natively Protestant. Catholicism was associated with the immigrant poor and the institutional cohesion of an international church. Obviously there are many reasons why blacks in America are historically Protesant, but a big one is that they were Americans, not immigrants, in a Protestant land, and the American/Protestant individualism gave them a Gospel that was not dependent on an existing institution.

Was there Catholic in America before the immigrant wave ? Like, way before the Independance War ? Thank you for your answer ! 

[little2add]

  “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

[bardegaulois]

Was there Catholic in America before the immigrant wave ? Like, way before the Independance War ? Thank you for your answer ! 

Not much of it. In fact one of the complaints about King George III in the American Declaration of Independence is his granting of free exercise of religion to the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada. As far as Catholics went, they were only a tiny proportion of the population, perhaps 1-2%, consisting of a small smattering of Irishmen, some French-Canadians on the frontier, a few sailors in port, and some English Catholics in Maryland. Maryland was actually established by English Catholics, but had something of a checkered colonial history. Nevertheless, there were several wealthy Catholic families that resided there, like the Carrolls, who produced America's first bishop and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the Pattersons, one of whom married Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte. In North America's colonial times, however, the only real bastions of Catholicism were lands ruled by the French or the Spanish.

[Nihil Obstat]

In what would become the United States, the biggest group of Catholics was likely the Acadians (and Cajuns).

[truthfinder]

In what would become the United States, the biggest group of Catholics was likely the Acadians (and Cajuns).

Yes, and they weren't expelled until 1755.  Louisiana itself was a French colony and had convents and such, so there was already an established Catholic presence before the Acadians. 

So, here's the wiki link we've all been looking for - at the bottom it has some numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_the_Thirteen_Colonies

[veritasluxmea]

Josh,

If it helps, I'm white, raised in a primarily white parish and diocese, and I was taught growing up about racism in the American Catholic Church towards blacks, how they had segregated churches and black priests were discouraged and even not allowed. I was taught about the history of the first black Catholic priest in America, Fr Augustus Tolton. The white Sisters of Notre Dame fought against racism towards him, supported his cause and helped educate him and supported his pursuit of the priesthood. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Tolton

A fair number of white Catholics *are* aware of black Catholic history. White Catholics have been aware of prejudice in the church, disagreeing with it and fighting it as well, as the sisters who helped Fr Augustus show. There are black Catholic communities in every diocese I've lived in. I've been to their masses and events. There can be a lot of awareness of this part of history, and making heroes like Fr Augustus and the Notre Dame sisters a basic part of every Catholic child's education is the solution, I think. 

Edited September 27, 2015 by veritasluxmea