Alexander Sample and the 1513 Project
How racist are the American bishops? (pretty racist)
[NOTE: this was originally slated for a Series Five on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Given the timely subject matter, I’m just dropping it now. If you are reading the email version of this piece, it may be truncated for length and you can link to the full piece by clicking on the link in the title.]
Every November, the full United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meets in Baltimore to debate, discuss, and vote on new teaching documents and issues in the contemporary church. These meetings, in recent years, have not gone well. The 2019 meeting was basically defined by a contentious debate over updating the bishops’ voter guide, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”, and whether it should maintain its outsize focus on the importance of abortion in its guidance to voters for the 2020 election - which would, as everyone in the room knew during the debate, be read as encouraging Catholic voters to re-elect Trump. Pope Francis had recently issued new teachings against the “harmful ideological error” of reducing voting - or broader participation in democracy - to a single issue, and a group of progressive (sliding scale) bishops had pushed for this language to be included in the 2020 edition of “Forming Consciences…”
The bishops voted this change down, and the reason why was best summarized by Archbishop Alexander Sample during the debate: “We are at a unique moment with the upcoming election cycle to make a real challenge to Roe v. Wade, given the possible changes to the Supreme Court. We should not dilute our efforts to protect the unborn.” An editorial in National Catholic Reporter blasted this as “a thinly disguised endorsement of not only the Republican Party but also the Trump administration,” but I strongly disagree with that description, since Sample didn’t really seem to be "disguising" anything. Like most US bishops, Sample was saying “I’m Republican, I would like to encourage people to vote Republican, because there’s one political issue I care about the most and I think Republicans are better on it.” He is not unique among bishops in thinking this way, and one of the main things that you should take away from this piece is that Sample is a very good example of how most of the members of the USCCB handle political engagement.
I’m not interested in whether Sample is correct that this is a unique moment in the fight against abortion, although I will point out that bishops have said some version of what he has said in each of the past eleven presidential election cycles and none of them have been correct yet. I think it’s far more interesting that he jumped on this “unique moment”; since the Supreme Court is likely to change again in the next four years, Sample doesn’t want to waste the opportunity to get another anti-abortion justice on the Court.
The question I want to ask, then, is how Sample handles other “unique moments”, how he has responded when there have been other major historical opportunities for change in our government and how it responds to the call for justice from the suffering and marginalized. See, Sample isn’t just an Archbishop, he’s the Archbishop of Portland. Which means he’s been in the middle of a thunderstorm of protests over police violence, which have now escalated to the point where unidentifiable officers from the Department of Homeland Security are disappearing protestors, an explicit use of state violence to quell dissent on behalf of minority rule, something that we usually call “fascism”. Catholic activists are on the front lines of protesting for racial justice in Portland, and you’ll never guess how Sample is responding to the protests in his city, or the involvement by Portland Catholics in the Black Lives Matter movement in general. Unless you guessed “poorly”, in which case, yeah, you nailed it.
CHAPTER ONE - THE SAMPLE PLATTER
So if Sample is the guy that stood up and said "we have to tell everyone to vote for Republicans because of the Supreme Court," let's see how many of his other policy positions we can guess.
Gay people? Not a fan! Barred them from receiving the sacraments until they went to Confession for any past sexual activity! Barack Obama? Also not a fan! Felt a need to make a condemnatory statement when Obama got an honorary degree from Notre Dame in 2009! Sex abuse? In a real pickle! Portland was the first archdiocese in the country to declare bankruptcy because of all of the settlements they had to pay out from old sexual abuse cases, although that all happened before Sample moved there. In fact, it’s likely because of Portland’s history that Sample used some very strong rhetoric when the crisis got re-upped in 2018, apologizing for the betrayal of Catholics everywhere, calling for more lay oversight of the church, and ultimately writing that "in the history of the church, whenever there was a moral or spiritual crisis, God has raised up saints who became agents of reform. This is a time for saints." Sample is perfectly capable of saying the right thing on occasion, and as we look at the times when he chose to say nothing, or chose to deliberately say the wrong thing, we should think about what he considers “a moral or spiritual crisis” and what calls for “a time for saints.”
Now, just like political media, Catholic media is hopelessly polarized, and you get two very different pictures of Sample depending on which sources you look at. For example, more liberal-leaning sources treated Sample’s actions towards gay Catholics as needlessly draconian, but the right-wing folks at a website called Catholicism Dot Org claimed that it was actually the rest of society being draconian by letting ‘homosexuals’ live their lives and receive the sacraments:
“What would seem to be a given in Catholic sacramental discipline isn’t anymore. That, sadly, is a fact we all know today. Just south of Portland in the diocese of San Jose, California, active homosexuals are welcome (no exclusivity there), two even working as a “married” couple for a San Jose parish and lauded on Santa Clara parish website. San Jose Bishop Patrick McGrath, no doubt, will suffer no consequences. On the other hand, good Bishop Alexander Sample of Portland will likely get pilloried in the press and perhaps worse, if ‘gay’ activists go after him.”
First of all, San Jose is a ten-hour drive from Portland - according to Google Maps, exactly 666 miles if you take the 5 - which I don’t believe qualifies as “just south” of Portland, since I don’t consider Birmingham, Alabama to be “just south” of Chicago. Second, this bifurcated media landscape comes up all the time when you’re trying to find information on the bishops, or the church in general. Take two sources I use all the time in G.O.T.H.S., and how they look at Archbishop Sample: The National Catholic Reporter and the National Catholic Register, which I will admit is extremely confusing because they have the same acronym. But the Reporter, “The Independent News Source” according to their website, would be considered liberal-leaning, and, as I quoted above, was extremely critical of Sample’s actions at the 2019 USCCB conference, but also reported on his somewhat better response to the abuse crisis. In contrast, the Register is owned by EWTN, an explicitly Trumpist and right-wing media organization funded by moneyed conservative interests to send their anchor, Raymond Arroyo, to interview Trump and talk about how big and strong he is.
So the Register’s pieces on Sample are generally less critical, and he was actually featured in a 2017 listicle titled “Little-Known Facts About 7 North American Bishops”. Now, the bishops selected for the Register’s bishop sample platter (nice pun, me) are all insane reactionary men obsessed with culture war bullshit - in addition to Sample, the other featured players were Naumann, Kurtz, Conley, Miller, Paprocki, and the late Morlino, who all regularly turn up in news stories about bishops denying Communion to Democrats or gay people. Morlino is one whom I covered in an earlier piece on the Diocese of Madison, and, to be absolutely clear, whom I’m very glad is now dead. The “fun facts” shared included things like Bishop Conley taking an arrest earlier in life when he protested at an abortion clinic “peacefully” with Operation Rescue, which was not actually a peaceful organization by their own admission, since the guy running the organization at the time was actively calling for the execution of women who got abortions, one of the top lieutenants in that organization was arrested for murder, and Operation Rescue has since disowned these tactics from the early days of their organization. Morlino’s fun fact was that he said mean things about “dissident” group Call To Action, which is not a dissident group but has been around for decades and is made up of faithful Catholics trying to push the leadership of the church away from the same group of old white Republican men like, say, the now-deceased Madison bishop who vocally supported gutting public unions and blamed the church’s entire sex abuse ciris on “homosexuals”. Sample’s fun fact, thankfully, was more benign (he lives with his mom).
The reason I bring up this media polarization is not just to make fun of EWTN, although that is still very important and we should all do it. The two poles of Catholic media have also had two very different responses to the recent protests against racial injustice in America, and one of them clearly informed Sample’s own response to the Catholic protestors in his city.
CHAPTER TWO - THE 1513 PROJECT
But we need to back up, because Sample isn’t the first bishop to just completely fuck a pumpkin on racism. You probably don’t need or want a primer on how institutional white supremacy has been hard-wired into American society for centuries, but I want to take a minute to highlight a few of the times in history when the biggest cheerleader for that institutional white supremacy has been the Catholic church.
Slaves arrived in the new world four centuries ago, with rules governing the slave trade eventually written into the Constitution, and America is still recovering. Catholics arrived a century before trans-Atlantic slaves, with the first explorers reaching Florida in the early 16th century; we're recovering from that, too, and definitely recovering from the Catholic church's participation in the slave trade. The Catholic church eventually became the largest institutional slaveholder in the state of Florida, as well as Louisiana and Kentucky. Maryland was the first colony run by Catholics; because it was founded by Catholics escaping persecution in England, they were the first colony to allow for religious freedom. While I'm glad that Catholics were the first colonists to abolish state religion, I'm a little less glad that they weren't the first to abolish slavery, since Maryland was also a slave colony, the Catholic family who founded Maryland owned slaves, the Catholic church also became the largest slaveholding institution in that state, and the state produced the first-ever Catholic Supreme Court Justice, Roger Taney, who was - brace yourself - a slaveholder and a racist, whose judicial decisions in cases like Dred Scott v. Sanford would exacerbate the conflicts leading to the Civil War. Part of the Maryland colony that has since become Washington DC is home to Georgetown, one of the country's preeminent Catholic universities and alma mater of notable Catholic thinkers like Jim Gaffigan, Mike Birbiglia, and John Mulaney; the Jesuits funded the university by selling slaves, a reality for which the school has only recently started to make reparations.
But that's all East Coast stuff, the history of Catholicism on the famously chill and liberal West Coast was probably way better, right? Well, the Spanish missions in what is now California were established in the 18th century by Fransican priest Junipero Serra, who was canonized by Pope Francis is 2015 and whose name you may have heard in the news recently, since protestors in California have been toppling some of his statues in order to provoke a reckoning with the history of the missions and their role in the colonization and subjugation of California's indigenous peoples. The legacy of these missions and the message of canonizing the man who ran them is extremely messy, and at this moment Catholics are debating questions like "were the missions places that treated indigenous people with respect and dignity?" (definitely not, conversion was often brutally enforced) and "well were the missions better for the natives than the Spanish conquistadors?" (probably, but that's not a high bar) and "did Serra personally commit every colonial atrocity himself? (no but he established the system that enabled it) and "was the church acting consistently with the standards of that time and place?" (yes but sometimes I would like to see the church held to a slightly higher standard than "genocide kind of came with the territory").
As America grew into country-ness, the story of the church in America shifted from colonization to aggressively defending slavery and segregation at times when it was tearing the country apart. Pope Gregory XVI categorically condemned all forms of racial slavery in 1839 - I know, seems late - but the bishops in the U.S. simply said that Gregory must not have been referring to their country, thus giving themselves license to ignore the grave moral evil they themselves were participating in, a pattern which has only repeated itself several thousand times since. In the Jim Crow era, bishops actively argued against integrating schools and looked the other way when Klansmen attacked black parishoners. A Catholic parish in Louisville was the kickoff site for an anti-integration rally and parade (a fucking parade!) in 1976, which seems way too fucking late to have an anti-integration rally; it’s entirely possible that priests who saw this happen are still alive today. When doctors and hospitals allowed for deliberate and racially-driven discrepancies in care, as well as gruesome medical experimentation on people of color, rest assured that Catholic hospitals were eager participants.
We should talk about the church being racist the same way we talk about American institutions being racist: we're not saying that every policeman and home loan officer and prosecutor and city planner and legislator and mayor and judge woke up and said "I'm going to be racist today", just like the bishops didn’t wake up and say “I’m going to be racist today” (although some of them definitely did). We're saying that America, and the church in America, were projects that relied on conquest of indigenous peoples and enslavement of people of color to get started, and that policies and institutions haven't done enough to shake off that heritage, and that it's very easy for white people to overlook these shortfalls because we've benefited so much from all of it. Catholics have been doing the America thing longer than Americans have been doing the America thing; every part of the country's history that is sordid or shameful or a failure of institutions is something that the church knew about and was part of, often enthusiastically so. The church was also a colonizer. The church was also a slaveholder. The problems of white supremacy in America are the problems of white supremacy in the church. Fr. Bryan Massengale, a professor at Fordham, puts it like this:
"What makes the Church white and racist is the pervasive belief that European aesthetics, European music, European theology, and European persons, and only these, are standard, normative, universal, and truly Catholic. In other words, when we talk about what makes something Catholic, the default is always to the products that reflect a white cultural aesthetic. Everything else is seen as Catholic by exception, or Catholic by toleration...Being “sacred” means speaking in a white idiom, praying in a white idiom, using European hymns. It’s this normative whiteness that’s ubiquitous in the Catholic Church—which is its greatest hindrance to dealing effectively with issues of race."
Now, swap out "truly Catholic" for "truly American," and you can see where Catholic and American problems start to overlap. Part of the reason Massengale is so good at talking about this stuff is that he's one of only about one hundred African-American priests out of the tens of thousands of priests in the church today. So when Archbishop Sample is open about getting politically involved in the abortion debate but strangely reticent when it comes to talking about the church and racism, you can say "wow gee that's not very pro-life of you," and you'd technically be correct, but know that he's absolutely in line with the American church's giant blind spot over the past several centuries. And, of course, he's absolutely in line with the bishops that he works with today.
CHAPTER THREE - CRUISING FOR DICK ON THE CATHOLIC SPEAKER CIRCUIT
While the Catholic church as described above has sometimes been so on the wrong side of history that they were hosting literal racism parades, their response to the blatant racism of the Trump era has ranged from "open embrace" (rare but not nonexistent) to "callous indifference" (pretty common) to "half-ass statements where people keep putting their feet in their mouths" (far, far more common than it should be). It wasn’t particularly strong before Trump, either, to be clear. The bishops didn’t even have a committee on racism until after the Charlottesville tragedy in 2017, when they slapped together an ad-hoc committee to put out statements about Black Lives Matter, most of which are now broken links on their website. Tellingingly, in 2016, they put out a statement mourning the death of two police officers in Dallas, who were killed during a protest; the protest was responding to the earlier police murders of two other men, for whom the USCCB apparently did not think a statement was necessary.
Once the ad-hoc committee got started, they put together a few resources, including a now-infamous pastoral letter that we’ll look at in the next chapter. Looking at their response to specific events, we can start in August 2019, after the El Paso mass shooting, when the committee wrote [emphasis mine]:
“The tragic loss of life of 22 people this weekend in El Paso demonstrates that hate-filled rhetoric and ideas can become the motivation for some to commit acts of violence. The anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic sentiments that have been publicly proclaimed in our society in recent years have incited hatred in our communities. Hatred and harsh rhetoric were echoed in the El Paso shooter’s explanation about why he committed this weekend’s shooting...We, therefore, renew our call to all to act swiftly to stop using hate-filled language that demeans and divides us and motivates some to such horrific violence. Instead, we ask our leaders and all Americans to work to unite us as a great, diverse, and welcoming people.”
It’s been a long time since I was in high school English, but I still try to edit out passive voice from the stuff I write; the bishops were fine with saying that ‘anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic statements...have been publicly proclaimed’, but didn’t feel a need to mention who was doing the actual proclaiming, presumably because they were people in the White House and political allies of the bishops. Much like the “office-involved shootings” that the news often covers, we are dealing with a lot of “President-involved racism” in the eyes of the USCCB. Later that same month, when the Trump administration announced increased enforcement and removal activity from ICE in major cities - in other words, widespread raids of immigrant communities to round up and deport more people. The USCCB put out a statement in response, which was - again, brace yourself - mealy-mouthed and widely criticized. Here is the statement in its entirety:
“We recognize the right of nations to control their borders in a just and proportionate manner. However, broad enforcement actions instigate panic in our communities and will not serve as an effective deterrent to irregular migration. Instead, we should focus on the root causes in Central America that have compelled so many to leave their homes in search of safety and reform our immigration system with a view toward justice and the common good. We stand ready to work with the Administration and Congress to achieve those objectives. During this unsettling time, we offer our prayers and support to our brothers and sisters, regardless of their immigration status, and recognizing their inherent dignity as children of God.”
That’s it, folks. Not “this seems immoral”, not “we can’t tear families apart, that’s not who we are”, not even “Catholics should write to their Congressmen to oppose this,” but just a quick “hey, we should find a better way to discourage people from coming and living here, which to be clear is definitely something we want to do.” Now, it may seem like a big assumption that both of these statements were written with a clear eye towards supporting Donald Trump's policies, so why don’t I take a minute and tell you the story of Judy Keane, the then-Public Affairs director of the USCCB who would have signed off on both of these statements, and who, for reasons that are about to become very obvious, is no longer the Public Affairs director of the USCCB.
Since this is a G.O.T.H.S. piece, you know that we are going to talk about a once-proud Catholic who was undone by their tragic inability to stop posting; in August 2019, the same month that the two above statements came out, Keane made the news for a series of tweets she had made that not only contained effusive praise for President Trump’s policies, but also linked to weird alt-right websites. As the Washington Post reported:
“Among [Keane’s] tweets that started gaining attention in July was one from May 29 that responded to Gingrich’s criticism of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. “Lowest unemployment rate EVER, incredibly robust economy under Pres. Trump — is that also fictional? Facts are stubborn things beyond a typo. Read all accomplishments here,” she wrote. She linked to a site listing what it called the president’s “accomplishments” including: “Trump takes ‘shackles’ off ICE, which is slapping them on immigrants who thought they were safe,” “Rescinded DACA” and “it’s a bloodbath at the State Department.”
Keane also enjoyed openly criticizing Kamala Harris for being a tax and spend Evil Socialist Democrat, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez for “deserving the Nobel Prize in stupidity”, and Wolf Blitzer whom I’m honestly fine with people criticizing. The USCCB is non-partisan and has to stay that way to maintain their tax-exempt status - this is why a bishop might tell you that you can’t vote for a pro-choice candidate but is unlikely to directly tell you to vote for Trump - so while Keane was technically making these comments as a private citizen, a lot of reporters and Catholics were starting to wonder why someone on the bishops’ payroll was tweet out links to a site called ‘MAGAPill’, and the bishops clearly did not want to talk about that at all, so Keane was suspended and eventually replaced in late August. She is now on the Catholic speakers circuit, and because of her specific area of expertise in Catholicism, her profile on her speakers bureau website is awkwardly worded, especially the final sentence:
“Judy is an accomplished speaker with experience speaking at large conferences to weekend retreats. While Judy can speak on a variety of topics she has a special focus on speaking about being Single and Catholic. Over the past decade, she has been an active board member of the Arizona Marian Conference where she has also served as a speaker and Master of Ceremonies. Judy is an experienced communications professional and a former broadcast news producer for a major television affiliate. A lifelong Catholic, she resides in Phoenix, Arizona and is single.”
SHE’S SINGLE, GENTLEMEN. Since she’s now off cruising for dick on the Catholic speaker circuit, the USCCB statements on racism in 2020 have become a lot stronger just kidding they still suck. Even looking at their recent response to a vigilante killing of a protestor in Kenosha, caught on video, you’d find this:
“We restate our commitment to peacefully seeking racial justice. We stand in solidarity with Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee, which serves the City of Kenosha, who earlier this week said, ‘Violence can never be the means to attain peace and justice. The Church stands as a beacon of hope...We reiterate the value of those whose human life and dignity in this country are marginalized through racism and our need to fight for them including the unborn. Considering the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and in other cities across the nation, we urge all people of faith to observe August 28 or the Feast of St. Peter Claver on September 9 as a day of fasting and prayer.”
What you won’t find in that statement is any mention of what actually happened in Kenosha - not even a mention that a man died - or of the President-involved rhetoric that led to that shooting, but you do have an invitation to pray more, and a quick shoutout to the unborn as a subtle reminder to continue voting Republican, please.
It seems pretty clear to me that the USCCB has no idea how to handle or talk about any of this. Regarding the death of George Floyd, while there were two short statements from the conference about how racism is bad and perhaps the church hasn’t done enough to address it, the USCCB decided not to speak with one voice on police killings and protests. Instead, individual bishops and diocese have issued statements sporadically since May, and the USCCB collects them all on their website. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; each city is facing a unique situation when it comes to racial justice, policing, and protests, and it’s okay to have a response that addresses the unique needs of each diocese. And, as it turns out, a lot of bishops did speak up; as of September 13 as I’m writing this, bishops have put out 77 different official statements responding to the death of George Floyd. Some of them were joint statements by all of the bishops across a state or archdiocese, some bishops put out multiple statements as time went on, some just spoke for themselves as pastors to their congregation. And, since this is supposed to be a piece about Sample, we should actually look at his statement responding to Floyd’s death.
He hasn’t written one.
The bishops have put out 77 different official statements responding to the death of George Floyd, which is now almost four months in the past. Sample, for some reason, still doesn’t seem to think this is worth his time, nor does he seem to think that any broader official statement on racial justice is worth his time. It’s not like there aren’t protests in Portland - there are definitely protests in Portland, and as we’ll see, Catholics are heavily involved in what is a very unique situation among protests in our country right now. But Sample hasn’t even suggested that it’s sad that a man died. He did make one offhand comment during his Facebook “chapel chat” video encouraging parishes to review the USCCB’s pastoral letter on racism from 2018, titled “Open Wide Our Hearts”, but that’s the one that I said earlier was infamous. We should take a look at why that is.
CHAPTER FOUR - CHURCH-INVOLVED RACISM
“Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism” was published by the USCCB in 2018, and written in response to the Charlottesville tragedy. The letter sucks.
The letter requires a charitable reading even to get to the takeaway “racism might be bad”, and certainly requires far more than a charitable reading to determine that the church may have actually been part of the racist history of America at some point. Here’s a paragraph from the bishops’ summary of the African-American experience:
“Racial categories, which classified different ethnic communities as different races, some even as subhuman, were used to justify this new form of slavery. The injustices of chattel slavery were horrifying and lasted for generations. Families were separated, marriages were forbidden or dishonored, and children were maltreated and forced to work...In freedom, millions of blacks lived in constant fear for their lives. Most resided in extreme poverty and endured daily indignities in their interactions with whites. Efforts to advance out of poverty by working a small farm, owning a business, building a school, or forming a trade union generally met fierce resistance throughout the country….Consistently, African Americans have been branded, by individuals, society, and even, at times, by members of the Church, with the message that they are inferior. Likewise, this message has been imprinted into the U.S . social subconscious.”
Yes, even at times - written as though it’s meant to be surprising! - the church sometimes suggested that African-Americans were inferior to whites. This doesn’t cut it when the church, again, was the largest slaveholding institution across multiple states, when the “racial categories” were often written by people at the Vatican in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The passive voice in that paragraph is concussion-inducing. Families were separated, marriages were forbidden, children were maltreated, it just sucks that racism kept happening to these people, but let’s not give any thoughts to who was making that racism happen, who was separating those families, who would scream slurs at a little girl integrating a grade school and then go to Mass on the weekends. Racism, according to this pastoral letter, is a thing that happened, not a thing people do, and oh man, if it is a thing people do, it’s certainly not a thing the church does or ever did as an institution. And also, maybe racism isn’t even that bad, as the pastoral letter decides to use the word “condemn” at only one point, and you’ll never guess what the bishops decided to condemn in their letter on racism:
“We read the headlines that report the killing of unarmed African Americans by law enforcement officials. In our prisons, the number of inmates of color, notably those who are brown and black, is grossly disproportionate. Despite the great blessings of liberty that this country offers, we must admit the plain truth that for many of our fellow citizens, who have done nothing wrong, interactions with the police are often fraught with fear and even danger. At the same time, we reject harsh rhetoric that belittles and dehumanizes law enforcement personnel who labor to keep our communities safe. We also condemn violent attacks against police.”
Holy shit. Black people are scared of police, that really sucks for them that they don’t feel safe, we hope some day they decide to feel safer, and MOTHERFUCKER IN THIS CHURCH WE BACK THE BLUE. Noted racist and single lady Judy Keane was still Public Affairs director for the USCCB when this letter was written and published; while she didn’t write the letter, it’s worth emphasizing again that when there are people in the bishops’ front office who gleefully celebrate immigrants being sent to concentration camps, it’s a good bet that the bishops they work for aren’t going to have the concerns of people of color at the forefront of their thinking, even when they are supposed to be writing a letter saying that “racism is bad”.
The letter has been widely panned over the past two years. Pastorally speaking, it’s almost nothing, and “almost nothing” is also an accurate description of the actions taken by the church after the letter came out. In November 2019, Olga Segura reached out to each of the 197 diocese in the country to see if they had actually changed anything or started any new initiatives in response to the letter. As she wrote for America, 42 diocese total responded to her to say that they had an anti-racism program in place; 30 of them were setting up new initiatives in response to the pastoral letter, and the remaining 12 were diocese that already had anti-racism programs in place before 2018, which, out of 197, is pathetic. And while individual parishes can start reading groups or committees, and while those groups can have an impact, this still means that 155 diocese in the country were run by bishops who just didn’t think that this was a big enough priority for them to formally push their churches and pastors and parishoners to do something. And, of course, one of those 155 was the Archdiocese of Portland, where Archbishop Alexander Sample, in response to the letter, did nothing in 2018 and 2019, and as we’ll see in 2020, did worse than nothing.
The “Open Wide Our Hearts” letter and the response to it are, at best, incredibly toothless, and were recently the subject of a searing critique by Eric Martin in Catholic activist journal Sojourners, titled “The Catholic Church Has a Visible White Power Faction”. The piece, as you can tell from the title, does not think the “Open Wide Our Hearts” letter is doing very much to stop racism. In fact, Martin begins his piece by pointing out that during the drafting process, one bishop submitted an amendment to include an explicit condemnation of nooses, swastikas, and Confederate flags, which was voted down by his fellow bishops (remember, the letter only condemns one thing). From there, Martin traces the members of white supremacist movements in the Trump era who proudly advertise their Catholic faith, attend Mass regularly, and live out the teachings of Jesus by donning SS gear and planning to gun down Jews with AR-15s. The message is clear: the bishops are choosing to be silent at a time when silence is enabling horrors across the country.
The thing is, the Sojourners piece is also infamous, because the bishops complained about it and briefly got it pulled from the journal's website; specifically, the bishops took offense to Martin’s assertion that they refused to condemn nooses, swastikas, or Confederate flags in the Open Wide Our Hearts letter. As they put it, they didn’t need to condemn nooses or swastikas because those were already widely recognized symbols of hatred, and then, yeah, ok, they technically voted down any condemnation of Confederate flags in the final version of the piece, they’ll give Martin that one.
Shockingly, the bishops caught some backlash for this, and the explanation I just paraphrased above somehow did not make them look like the brave anti-racist organizers that they thought they were. The founder and editor in chief at Sojourners had to resign after putting out four increasingly desperate statements about why he had to pull the piece, and why pulling a thoroughly researched piece just because the bishops didn’t like it is something that the editor of a Catholic news site should be able to do and still sleep at night, and the piece is now back up on the website. I didn’t really see a reason to pull it, but I can certainly understand why the bishops didn’t like it, because Martin’s piece in Sojourners is unforgiving, asserting that the explicit neo-Nazis in the church see no conflict with their faith and receive no meaningful pushback or condemnation from the American church hierarchy, and it’s all leading here:
“The threat is not that white nationalists will take over the Catholic Church. The threat is that the Catholic Church harbors a culture sufficiently friendly to white nationalism that people can comfortably embrace both the faith and the most extreme forms of racial hatred. As long as Catholics can be found in neo-Nazi groups, as long as Atomwaffen members can dub themselves Catholicwaffen or receive Communion after murdering Jewish people, something in the church itself poses a concrete danger to Jews and people of color.”
From here, Martin’s piece goes on to examine the actions of prominent Catholics in the federal government like Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway (or, if you want to add more to the list, William Barr, Michael Flynn, Kayleigh McEnany, Steve King), and the role they play in taking these explicit white supremacist ideas and policies and laundering them for a wider audience. The Catholic church in 2020 is a place where white supremacists - and not the more subtle white supremacists, the violent ones - feel at home.
The reality is that as long as bishops like Sample and his colleagues are willing to inflate abortion politics to the level where all other issues are considered unimportant to Catholics, as long as they are willing to loudly complain that they are being treated unfairly when a journalist calls them out on their silence and complicity, and as long as they are willing to pretend that racism is just something that falls out of the sky and not something that people in their pews are participating in, white supremacists will feel no qualms about committing murder and then showing up for Communion the next morning, and the Catholic church as an institution will pose a material threat to marginalized communities in this country, just like they did when they were slaveholders, just like they did when they were colonizers, just like they did when they were segregationists. And if you think that it's a jump to say that Sample, specifically, is willing to downplay the threat of white supremacist violence, you should look at what is happening in Portland right now.
CHAPTER FIVE - THE WAR OF THE ROSE CITY
I referred earlier to the polarization in how Catholic media cover our bishops, but that polarization extends to the coverage of the 2020 protests in Portland. You've probably already heard the non-Catholic part of this story on the news: like many American cities, sustained protests erupted in late May in response to the death of George Floyd, one in a long list of black men executed by the state without a criminal charge or a trial. Like protests in most cities, the ones in Portland are still ongoing and represent actions by all sorts of different groups using all sorts of different tactics; we still don't know where all of it is heading. Like protests in most cities, the response from police has escalated the violence between protestors and the state: the mayor has been tear-gassed, peaceful protestors have been beaten with clubs, men shot in the head with rubber bullets need facial reconstruction surgery.
The next part of the story you heard from NPR or the New York Times is what makes the Portland protests unique: ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse and our big important statues, federal agents who appear to be drawn from Customs and Border Protection, the US Marshal Service, and other Department of Homeland Security agencies, are now also part of the response to the protests. I say "appear to be" because these agents aren't identifying themselves and are using unmarked vehicles when they arrest and hold protestors without charges. Oregon's governor and Congressional delegation have sharply criticized the presence of these agents, while the acting DHS Secretary has maintained that disappearing protestors and fumbling towards fascism is a good and valid response to graffiti showing up on federal property.
Here is where we see two different responses to the protests in Catholic media, two different ways of asking what is and is not justified on either side. On August 4th, National Catholic Register ran with "Protestors Burn Bible Outside Federal Courthouse During Portland Protests". In addition to being awkwardly worded - using "protest" twice in the same headline isn't great - running something like this is a pretty clear choice from the folks over at EWTN who choose what stories get covered and what stories don't. When the protests first started in Minneapolis, the Register led with the fire damage to the city's basilica. Not "people are reacting to a police murder", but "look at the property damage these protestors have done". And now these thugs are burning a Bible! Black Lives Matter must be Satanaic and Marxist, clearly every Catholic must be opposed to the people burning Bibles! Although it's also possible that the Bible burning alleged by the National Catholic Register didn't actually happen, according to the National Catholic Register, who pointed out in their own piece that their video of the incident "appears to have originated from the Russia-controlled Ruptly video agency, and has not been verified." The burning Bible isn't even mentioned in the police report of the incident, and if it was, the Register definitely would have mentioned that because they cited the police report at several other points throughout their piece to highlight how unacceptable and borderline-sacreligious these protestors were being.
In contrast, on July 28th, the National Catholic Reporter highlighted a different part of the protests, also unique to Portland: the Wall of Moms. In mid-July, after the federal intervention began, a group of Portland women suited up in helmets, goggles, pads, and shields, and joined the protests specifically as a human shield to protect protestors from the increasing violence from federal agents. They are now joined by a Wall of Vets, and a Wall of Dads, the latter of whom have reached the platonic ideal of Dad Energy by using leaf blowers to push tear gas back towards the police.
Some members of the Wall of Moms are Catholic, and several of them hail from St. Andrew's, a parish in Portland that has served as an unofficial home for leftist Catholic activists. As one Mom put it, "As Catholics, Black Lives Matter is so fundamental to what we believe in the sanctity of all life...As Catholics, we are here to stand for racial justice. It's our birthright. I think it's fundamental. It should be a no-brainer." These are powerful words, and after everything we just read from the bishops, it's about damn time we found a Catholic who considers racial justice to be our birthright. As another parishoner, Catholic school teacher, and Mom put it to the Reporter, "George Floyd called out to his mother. That was a call to all of us."
That quote is going to stick with me for a long time, as is the Moms' account of the protests every night, which asserts that the violence is being driven by the police and federal agents, and the only "violence" that the Moms have observed on the part of the protestors had been graffiti and some property damage. But again, the Catholic media is polarized, and as media consumers, it is our responsibility to determine who we should trust more: the women on the ground facing down the feds, or an unverified video taken off of the feed of a foreign news network. Your decision likely determines how you feel about the protests as a Catholic, and how you'll feel about Sample's response to the protests.
I already said that Sample hasn’t put out any official statements on the death of George Floyd, maybe he’s just looking for the right words and it’s taking him four months to think of them. But I don’t think that’s the case, because he’s flapping his yap on Facebook Live videos telling the protestors that they should just shut up and go home. In his words, the protestors are all about “violent destruction that every evening results in looting and the destruction of property, clashes with police and federal agents. It's a mess, quite honestly…[it’s] about the riots, the destruction of property, the graffiti. Who remembers George Floyd anymore?” I would argue that the St. Andrew's parishoners out protecting protestors explicitly in George Floyd's name, who attend Mass at a church that has erected a shrine to him and other victims of police killings, are doing a very good job remembering George Floyd while Sample is dicking around on Facebook. But Sample urged protestors to stop, encouraged them to start a reading group about “Open Wide Our Hearts” instead - something that, as mentioned above, 42 diocese had started to do in 2019 and Portland still hadn’t, which feels like it’s his fucking department and not the Moms’ - and generally seems like a guy who is paying absolutely no attention to what is going on in his own city besides what he’s seeing from EWTN.
Remember, Sample is the man who said the church needed to take a strong stance on abortion, because there was an unprecedented opportunity to make a significant change in the national debate on this issue. Well, he has an unprecedented opportunity right now to change how we think about policing, how we think about a society that runs on violent enforcement, how we think about a federal government that sends secret police to detain citizens without cause or charges, how we think about a nation that is built on violent inequality. I do not expect Sample to be out in the streets fighting federal agents, I don’t think that’s the job of a bishop. But it is the job of a bishop to publish a letter when something of major import happens, as 77 of his colleagues did when George Floyd died. It is the job of a bishop to respond to the USCCB’s pastoral letter on racism, as 42 of his colleagues did in 2019. It is the job of a bishop, especially a bishop who urges his colleagues to be politically involved and outspoken on the issue of abortion, to pay attention to what is going on in his diocese and respond to it, rather than telling protestors to shut up and go home, and repeat reactionary talking points. I should point out that Sample has since claimed he was “misrepresented” by media reports, and that he does actually think that racial injustice exists in America, but again, the reason he had to clarify that is likely due to the previous multiple opportunities he took to stay silent when other bishops were speaking up.
It is difficult to find any justification for Sample’s actions and inaction over the past few years that does not lead me to this: he just doesn’t care about racial justice, or the violent racial inequality in America, and at this point in history, that makes him a racist. But hell, are we surprised? The bishops before him helped create the violent inequality. Speaking and acting with compassion on issues of racial justice, to be blunt, has never been a priority for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
EPILOGUE - A TIME FOR SAINTS
Here’s the direction from Pope Francis, in full, that some of the bishops wanted to include in “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” in the 2019 debate, and that Sample voted down.
“The other harmful ideological error is found in those who find suspect the social engagement of others, seeing it as superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist. Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend. Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection. We cannot uphold an ideal of holiness that would ignore injustice in a world where some revel, spend with abandon and live only for the latest consumer goods, even as others look on from afar, living their entire lives in abject poverty.”
Sample sees the need to jump on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make our federal courts even more reactionary, and considers “the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged” as mere inconveniences along the way, even when they are living and dying in his backyard. But why should we expect any different from him, or any other bishop? It's not like he's out of step with the rest of the USCCB, either currently or historically.
Remember what Sample said in response to the sexual abuse crisis: "in the history of the church, whenever there was a moral or spiritual crisis, God has raised up saints who became agents of reform. This is a time for saints." I’m not an expert on who gets to be a saint and who doesn’t, but this year, Catholic women heard a man crying out in the streets for his mother, and they ran into those streets to fight for him with shields and helmets and goggles, knowing full well what they were facing and facing it anyway. Sample told them to go home. Sample said that the most important thing Catholics could do was vote for the regime propping up that violence that killed George Floyd. Sample didn't find it necessary to put out any statement on the violence perpetrated against people of color in our country daily, with the blessing of the state, even when other bishops found time to do this bare minimum gesture.
Sample's correct about one thing: more than any other point in my life so far, now is a time for saints. So what the fuck does that make him?
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
America - “White Catholics need to sit with the discomfort of systemic racism” (2020)
America - “I reached out to every US diocese…” (2019)
Archdiocese of Portland Facebook Page - “Chapel Chat” (2020)
Catholic Speakers - “Judy Keane - Author, Business, Divine Mercy, Relationships” (2020)
Catholic Sentinel - “Archbishop Condemns Racism, Supports Police” (2020)
Cal Catholic Daily - “Portland archbishop: active gays must repent and change before receiving Communion” (2017)
Catholicism Dot Org - “Portland Archbishop: No Communion for Adulterers or Active Homosexuals” (2017)
Church Life Journal - “Whiteness as an Ecclesiological Heresy” (2020)
Commonweal - “Worship of a False God” (2020)
National Catholic Reporter - “The Failed Leadership of US Bishops is Clear” (2019)
National Catholic Reporter - “The church must make reparations for its role in slaver, segregation” (2020)
National Catholic Reporter - “The assumptions of white privilege and what we can do about it” (2020)
National Catholic Reporter - “Catholics join protest and ‘Wall of Moms’ in Portland” (2020)
National Catholic Reporter - “Archbishop Sample ‘Shaken to Core’...” (2018)
National Catholic Register - “Little-Known Facts About 7 North American Bishops” (2017)
National Catholic Register - “Protesters Burn Bible Outside Federal Courthouse During Portland Protests” (2020)
National Catholic Reporter - “Controversial Junipero Serra supported by some…” (2020)
Sojourners - “The Catholic Church Has a Visible White Power Faction” (2020)
USCCB - “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism” (2018)
USCCB - “USCCB President Calls for Prayers, Reflection, Civility, and Dialogue” (2016)
USCCB - “In Wake of Horrific, Hate-Filled Violence in El Paso…” (2019)
USCCB - “Statement of US Bishop Chairmen in Wake of Death of George Floyd and National Protests” (2020)
USCCB - “Statement of US Bishops’ President on George Floyd and Protests in American Cities” (2020)
USCCB - “In Wake of Kenosha Violence…” (2020)
USCCB - “Chairman of US Bishops’ Committee on Migration…” (2019)
Washington Post - “US Catholic bishops hire new spokeswoman…” (2019)