The Catholic Church and Segregation

Archbishop Thomas Toolen

of Mobile 1927-1969

Racial segregation was a given fact in U.S. society from the time that African slaves were first imported to Jamestown in 1619 until the mid-twentieth century and, in fact, continues today to lurk in various discrete nooks and crannies of our society. At the very beginning the Africans were treated as indentured servants and given their freedom after serving a designated number of years, but within a matter of twenty years this began to change and various court decisions ruled that Africans bought from Spanish or Portuguese traders were to be held in permanent servitude.  At the time of our Declaration of Independence in 1776, all thirteen colonies permitted slavery but gradually over the next thirty plus years Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and the New England States each passed laws abolishing slavery.  As Florida and Louisiana became American possessions they maintained the institution of slavery as they had known it under Spanish and French rule. 

There were social protocols governing the relationships of masters and servants, whether those servants be free or enslaved.  A servant was a member of the household, but not of the family.  Just like the Downton Abbey of early 20^th century England, servants never dined with the family, though a member of the family might, on occasion, eat with the servants.  Servants had their own living quarters distinct from the family.  Family members, no matter how young, were always spoken to by title by the servants and servants were always called by either their Christian name or their surname but never with a title.  If servants were in the family quarters it was to serve, not just to entertain themselves.  Separation was not strict—masters and servants often worked together on the farm or the buildings.  Servants helped dress and undress their masters and mistresses.  Conversations, while always correct and somewhat formal, might still be fairly intimate in content. 

The Catholic Church, like most of the Protestant Churches—Anglican, Reformed/Presbyterian, and after 1800 Baptist and Methodist, took slavery for granted.  The Maryland Jesuits, the only priests legally in the colonies before the Revolution, supported their mission work by the large plantations they owned and the slaves that worked them.  There was considerable debate among theologians about slavery and a distinction was drawn, as it has been about war, about “unjust” and “just” enslavement.  Nevertheless, the Church was slow to move against slavery.  Between 1573 and 1826 books arguing that slavery was fundamentally immoral ended up on the Index of Forbidden Books.  Some clergy who called for the emancipation of slaves in the United States were excommunicated.  It was only in 1839 that arch-conservative Pope Gregory XVI issued the Bull In Supremo Apostolatus condemning both the slave trade and the institution itself. 

In all this we must remember that the United States was not the only country practicing the enslavement of human persons.  Far more to the consciousness of the Roman Church was Latin America where slavery both of native peoples and imported African slaves was widespread.  By the time that Gregory issued his Bull, slavery had begun to disappear in the Latin American scene, at least as a formal institution.  The reaction of the U.S. Bishops to In Supremo Apostolatus was much the same as their more contemporary successors would give to the papal teaching on war, nuclear weapons, economic justice, and now, rights of immigrants.  They explained it away or, for the most part, just ignored it.  By Gregory’s time, the issue of slavery had become a powder keg threatening to blow up the Union and the bishops chose to turn a blind eye to slavery and a deaf ear to the papal magisterium.

Well, the Bishops may not have touched the match to the fuse but the blowup came and passed with way too much blood shed and the aftermath was not pretty.

This posting is not about slavery but about segregation and in the years immediately following the Civil War the Northern military governments controlling the Southern States which had been “in rebellion” instituted a program called “Reconstruction.”  In an attempt to right the wrongs of slavery (and to rub the rebel noses in the mud and remind them that they lost the war) many of the social institutions of the “Old South” were gutted.  Former slaves found themselves able to vote and to hold office while their masters, until they took an oath of allegiance to the Union could not.  The powerful were cast down from their thrones and the lowly were raised up, but it was a shaky and fragile state of things.  When the political winds in Washington changed, as they always do, and Reconstruction ended not with a bang but a whimper, those Blacks who had collaborated with the Reconstructionist “carpet baggers” found themselves out on a limb.  As more and more whites were able to vote they took over the political machinery and instituted a series of laws known as the Jim Crow Laws that established strict segregation of the races.  There were to be “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, and other public institutions for whites and for “people of color.”  They got the separate part right, but didn’t score high on the equal.  There were “separate but equal” rest rooms, swimming pools, and waiting rooms.  Restaurants were free to serve only whites and any restaurant that wanted to succeed in the white community did precisely that.  Whites and Blacks shopped at different stores, worshipped at different churches, and were buried in different cemeteries.  It was illegal for Blacks and Whites to intermarry and to be licensed to perform a wedding clergy had to post a bond that guaranteed that they would perform no such wedding. 

Now, before we think this is a Southern issue, the Northern States had a far more discrete method of segregation.  An African-American family looking to buy a home was shown homes in neighborhoods with other African-American families and Whites lived in White neighborhoods.  This meant, of course, that schools would be predominately White or “Colored” depending on the neighborhood.  And just like in the south, the schools where the majority of students were of African descent were last to receive books, experienced teachers, and educational materials.  As for churches—the parochial system in the United States guaranteed that Catholic churches in white neighborhoods would be white; those in Black neighborhoods would minister to the Black Catholic community, which generally was quite small.  I remember myself seeing, probably around 1960, a number of people stand up and leave the communion rail when a black family appeared at it.  To the Church’s credit, however, it provided many good and affordable parochial schools in Black parishes which gave children an opportunity to get ahead in competition of better high schools and colleges.  There were several religious orders of women established to work with African American children but most of the traditionally White communities pitched in just as hard.  If anything good can be said about the Church’s response to racial injustice, it is due to the women, not to the men. 

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the American bishops accepted the segregation status quo without complaint.  Although Missouri, a slave state, had remained in the Union during the Civil War it, like other Border States such as Kentucky and Maryland, had adopted the strict segregation policies of the deep South.  The Archdiocese of Saint Louis ran a good number of Catholic Schools for Black Children but the schools were all strictly segregated.  In the 1940’s progressive clergy—especially the Jesuits at Saint Louis University—began to press for an end to segregation and the Archbishop, John Glennon (later Cardinal), an octogenarian, fought the change from segregation.  Glennon, incidentally was not a Southerner himself but was Irish born and bred.  One priest, a member of the faculty at Saint Louis University, gave a blistering sermon that was reported in newspapers across the country accusing the Archdiocese of Saint Louis of immorality in its racial policies.  Other priests also spoke up in favor of integration and organized to push for integration of Church institutions.  In 1943 Webster College, a woman’s college run by the Sisters of Loretto agreed to accept black students.  Glennon contact the superior of the Sisters at the Motherhouse in Kentucky and had the decision reversed.  However the Jesuits at Saint Louis University began admitting African American students at the (then) all-male University. The relationship of the Jesuits at Saint Louis University and the Archbishops of Saint Louis has some interesting chapters, renewed again during the episcopate of our dear Cardinal Burke. 

The story was not much different elsewhere.  Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore/Washington resisted pressure to integrate the schools and parish of his Archdiocese which included the national capital.  As the Civil Rights Movement picked up momentum Catholic clergy were initially absent from the ranks because their bishops and religious superiors refused them permission to participate.  Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, one of the greatest blemishes on history of the Church in the United States, suspended priests for preaching in favor of Civil Rights for African Americans.  Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Mobile had made it clear that no priest was to participate in the marches with Dr. Martin Luther King and other Black leaders.   Once again, it was the women who led the way as the nuns showed up where the priests feared to go.  In fact, much of the “radicalization” of American Religious Women is rooted in their experience of challenging both the authority of the bishops and the power of social norms in their participation in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Toolen is an interesting example of the ambivalence of the American hierarchy towards racial justice.  He opened new churches, hospitals, schools, and orphanages to minister exclusively to African Americans and was derided as “the nigger bishop” for his commitment to work in the Black community.  In 1950 he opened Saint Martin de Porres Hospital in Mobile where both African American and White physicians could practice.   In 1964 he ordered the integration of the Catholic schools in his diocese—of course this was ten years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated integration of public schools.  To be fair, however, most public schools in the south had yet to be integrated so this is another instance where the Church is slow but still on the cutting edge.  As stated above he opposed the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations and forbad the clergy from participating.  One priest, Father Maurice Ouellet of the Edmundite Fathers was removed from his pastorate for permitting the parish rectory to be used for organizational meetings for Civil Rights Events.  He also rejected African Americans as seminary candidates for priesthood. One of those rejected, Joseph Howze, later became the first Bishop of Biloxi.

In my next posting we will deal with the saga of Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans and the excommunication of Judge Leander Perez, Jackson G. Ricau, and Una Gaillot, three segregationists who opposed his desegregation of Catholic Institutions in New Orleans Archdiocese.  

Requiescat in Pace, Daniel Berrigan SJ

Father Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit, died on Saturday April 30, 2016 in the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in New York City. 

Berrigan was a pivotal figure in the history of American Catholicism as he epitomized the new phenomenon of the Activist Priest.  While the Catholic Clergy in the United States had a long history of providing intellectual and academic backing for social reform with figures like Monsignor John Ryan and Monsignor George Higgins and while  Bishop Frank Haas, Monsignor Geno Baroni, and Monsignor John Boland were priests who worked closely with politicians to effect change, all were priests who stayed well within the defined role of the clergy and the limits of the law.  With Daniel Berrigan we get the priest who is not afraid to step out in a prophetic model and demand attention for the Truth he burns to speak. 

To appreciate Berrigan’s significance, we need to go back to the placid days of Dwight Eisenhower and pre-Vatican II Catholicism.  The Church stood with the establishment, or at least did not bite the hand that was feeding it.  The civil turmoil that has marked our nation was just starting sixty years ago.  Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were still young.  Catholics were not getting on bus of Civil Rights, we kept our nose out of other people’s issues.  Due to the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement of such powerful Catholic hierarchs as Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Mobile and Francis Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angles, Catholic clergy were long embarrassingly absent from the front lines of Dr. King’s protests.  Local Bishops and religious superiors prohibited their subjects from taking any direct action in Civil Disobedience though they were often more tolerant of their preaching on the subject.  It was seen that the role of the clergy and religious was preaching and teaching rather than social activism.   Some, like Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, appealed to their audiences through their writing.  But when, on May 17^th 1968 Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phil (then a member of Josephite Fathers), Brother David Darst of the Christian Brothers, and six lay associates went into the Selective Service Office in Catonsville MD and removed about 600 Draft Files to the parking lot where they were burned with homemade napalm, it was a new day for the role of the clergy as social activists and not merely theoreticians and teachers.  (Actually this was Philip Berrigan’s second act of civil disobedience; he had the year before poured blood on Selective Service Records in Baltimore.  Daniel was not involved in that action.)   Even though there were others involved, and Daniel did not seek the spotlight, he was from the beginning the center of interest.  He had a certain charism that drew your attention.  Not everyone was happy with Daniel Berrigan of course.  Cardinal Spellman, who was also the Bishop for the US military, would not permit him in the Archdiocese of New York.  Most Catholic institutions were afraid to host him.  He was convicted for the Catonsville Action and fled into hiding.  Captured at the Block Island home of Episcopalian theologian William Stringfellow he served three years in prison.  But his prison term seemed only to enhance his standing.

I think Berrigan’s deeply thoughtful personality, sound Jesuit spirituality, and natural gentleness gave him a moral credibility that he was able to transfer over to the causes he was associated with.  In 1980 he was one of the founders of the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear weapons group.  They broke into a General Electric facility in Pennsylvania where they hammered nuclear missile nose cones and poured blood on files.  Back to jail.  I think his willingness to take the punishment for his crimes also gave him a certain moral credibility. 

The story of the Plowshares Movement attack on the nuclear missile warheads was the subject of the 1983 film In the King of Prussia directed and written by Emile de Antonio starring Martin Sheen—and the Plowshares eight playing themselves.  Emile de Antonio was a maker of socio-political documentaries, perhaps the most significant director of social-political documentaries in the second half of the twentieth Century America, and the film made people stop and rethink the action of Plowshares activists from a moral perspective that gave it a  different nuance.  

Daniel Berrigan had a close friendship with and mutual admiration for Buddhist mystic Thich Nhat Hanh.  Both were committed deeply to the path of non-violence and Hanh writes of Berrigan’s influence on him in his book Living Buddha, Living Christ.  Berrigan seems not to have been too scrupulous about following some Catholic limitations on Inter-Religious Dialogue but Hanh writes a particularly surprising (and moving) description of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Of course, that is the problem with Berrigan.  He was not a rules follower.  Even by Jesuit standards, he was a pretty free agent. 

Daniel Berrigan was also an outspoken opponent of abortion and of the death penalty, espousing a true pacifist’s commitment to the Seamless Garment theology. 

Below are three quotes from Daniel Berrigan: 

But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of the truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible.

Spirituality was the main issue. Connection with God was the main issue

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

Tying Up This Tiger on An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life, or, The Issue Is Not The Veil

I was on a long car trip the day before yesterday and while I drove along through the snowy Appalachians I was listening to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on my iPod.   And of course I came to one of my favorite passages in that classic, the scene in Stave 3 where Bob Cratchit has just returned with Tiny Tim from Christmas morning church services:  

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

There is a lot of whining among the Katholic Krazies that what few nuns are left these days are overly involved in “social action” instead of teaching second grade or knitting scarves for tuberculosis patients.  Dickens’ remarks—indeed his entire career—is a reminder that there is nothing new about Christians seeing the intimate connection between the disadvantaged (we might actually choose to say “oppressed”) in our society and the Lord whom we claim—somewhat falsely I fear for some—to worship. 

There is no authentic Christianity that is not rooted in a passionate commitment to work for a just social order.  What I mean by a “just social order” is a society in which each of God’s children has access to the resources that God—who is Father of all—has intended for each of his children.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children go without food sufficient for the day when others of us can afford to waste so much excess.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can have multiple homes while others sleep on the streets.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can waste the opportunity for a good education that prepares them to make contributions to the common good of society while others have no escape from a life of drudgery—or even poverty—for no other reason that despite their intelligence, finances have closed the opportunities for learning.  There is much about the way our society is ordered that is fundamentally evil and we need the prophetic voice of Religious men and women to snap open our eyes and see beyond the blinders that the social order has fixed on us from the day we were first able to see.  Religious who shun the role of social prophecy make Religious Life redundant.  But the problem is that Religious today either tend uncritically to buy into the social order, living the lie that charity is sufficient and pursuit of justice is for those in the “secular world” of politics and economics, or they—as Sister Joan Chittester put it so well in her book The Fire in The Ashes endorse “postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now.”  To go back to where this series began and Sister Sara Marks: good heavens, gal, would you put down the latte and stop talking about the cute Calvin Klein dress you found at Good Will and get serious about something.  Nobody says you can’t go to the beach or even stop in at Starbucks—but are you so shallow that that is how you want to describe yourself?  Don’t be trendy—that is the last thing that gives credibility to Religious Life.  Be a pot-stirer.  Point out the turd in the punch bowl.  I don’t care if you wear a veil or not but I do want you to be authentic.

I spend a lot of time with a Religious priest I know who lives in a sufficiently comfortable parish his Order staffs.  Nice guys.  But they should call themselves the Order of Martha Stewart.  Do you really need to drink your single barrel Bourbon out of a Waterford tumbler?  Or if you do, do you have to point it out?    How many sets of dishes do you really need?  Yeah, yeah, yeah—your parishioners live this sort of a lifestyle.  I know the song.  But no, they don’t.  They normally eat in the kitchen, not the dining room.  A lot of nights they grab a bowl of soup or a couple of slices of pizza—shellfish or prime meats are not the everyday event.  I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat healthy, or even well: just be as invested in visiting the sick as you are in doing the shopping. 

On the other hand, for those who criticize the Religious for being too secular: get your own house in order first.  We all have the same call to holiness though we may live it out with some legitimate differences of style.  But God is no more impressed by superficiality in the laity than he is among the Religious. The Martha Stewart/latte bar/trendy life-style is just as vacuous for the lay disciple as it is for the Religious.  No matter who we are in the Church or in Society, in the eyes of God we are each only stewards of the gifts given us to build his kingdom here on earth during our lifetime. 

And as for those newbie Religious Orders who think that it is “evangelical poverty” or “discipleship” to keep their members from having the tools and resources with which to do God’s work—whether it be cars or computers or a good education—stop lying to yourselves and be honest that you are simply playing a manipulative game of control over the lives of your members.  Not everyone needs a car or a doctorate or his own room to achieve the work that God has set out for him or her to do—but there are those who do need things that sometimes cost money if they are to achieve their divinely-called potential.  The virtue lies not in not having but in not having more than we need to do the work that God has called us to. 

And if Religious are the first and foremost the People of Prayer whom they have been called to be by their vocation to the Religious Life they will come to a love for the poor, for the sick, for the disadvantaged in whose face they see the face of Him who became poor for our sake.  And they will not be satisfied with the false piety of a phony charity that thinks it is sufficient to alleviate today’s pangs of poverty by throwing some crumb or other to “comfort” the poor or the sick.  True charity realizes that while we must minister to the immediate need before us, we must also work to eradicate the evils that cause the poverty and suffering.  I can only think of Dom Helder Camara, the saint-Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, who challenged his critics with the words: “When I feed the poor you call me a Saint; when I ask you why they are poor, you call me a Communist.”   No,  Religious belong in the forefront of Social Justice, armed with the Gospel of Christ and with the Word God spoke through the Prophets.  If they don’t do that we really don’t need them in the Church today.