Much has happened in the intervening years. We established a diocesan Committee on Racism (Committee for Racial Harmony) under the chairmanship of Bishop Rene Valero. In each of these five years, he has provided diocesan-wide convocations to focus attention and provide motivation and means to address racism in parishes, schools and neighborhoods. Both leading to and stemming from these convocations, structures have emerged on parish, vicariate and inter-parochial levels to raise consciousness and provide assistance in creating opportunities for people to interact and thus get to know and appreciate one another better.

This past Lent of 1995, I was particularly pleased with the publication of a brochure that offered homiletic and penitential suggestions — a fitting way to use the Season of Penance — to redress the latent and remove the discovered racial biases that mar the image of God we are called to be, and to redeem our relationships with one another. With deep gratitude, I also welcome the brochure authored by Mr. Joseph Cunningham: Mandate, Programs and Objectives: A Brief History of the Committee's Work, December 1990 - May 1994. The story underscores the efforts made and outlines the path still to be traveled toward harmonious relationships.⁽¹⁾

Among the important developments of these five years, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an authentic compendium of Catholic belief, has a place of honor. In numerous entries, the Catechism calls our attention to the diverse make-up of the Church and the unity among peoples it seeks to establish and serve. There is, after all, only one faith: "Through the centuries, in so many languages, cultures, peoples and nations, the Church has constantly confessed the one faith, received from the Lord, transmitted by one Baptism, and grounded in the conviction that all people have only one God and Father" (#172). Yet this one Church/one faith is blessed with a wonderful diversity of gifts: "From the beginning, this one Church has been marked by a great diversity which comes from both the variety of God's gifts and the diversity of those who receive them. Within the unity of the People of God a multiplicity of peoples and cultures is gathered together. The great richness of such diversity is not opposed to the Church's unity. Yet sin and the burden of its consequences constantly threatens the gift of unity. And so the Apostle has to exhort Christians to maintain the unity in the Spirit in the bond of peace" (#814).

It is to be a source of sorrow for us that what the Apostle had to issue as an exhortation in the first Christian century has to be repeated in our own time. Yet, repeat it we will and we must be faithful to the human rootedness of the Church and the divine intention: "In the mind of the Lord the Church is universal by vocation and mission, but when she puts down her roots in a variety of cultural, social and human terrains, she takes on different external expressions and appearances in each part of the world" (#835). Given the mobility of peoples in our time, those various parts of the world relocate, as many have in Brooklyn and Queens, to enrich our part of the world with their own distinct culture and devotions. Here the Catechism asks acceptance of cultural diversity as of something intrinsic to the universality of the Church: "The character of universality which adorns the People of God is a gift from the Lord himself whereby the Catholic Church ceaselessly and efficaciously seeks for the return of all humanity and all its goods, under Christ the Head in the unity of the Spirit" (#831). This is part of the explanation of what "catholic" means as modifier of our Church.

God's desire that all come to salvation and knowledge of the truth, the pastoral directive written to Timothy and captioned at the beginning of this section of my letter, is the pastoral concern I had when I was installed as your Bishop and continue to have. As a concern, it has its own unique thrust along the lines of racial harmony and a desire to serve all racial groups through their own rich cultures because that is the reality of the make-up of our Church in Brooklyn and Queens. One hundred and eighty square miles — probably the smallest territorial area for a Diocese; but more than a million and a half Catholics — a population that would rival many an archdiocese. In complexity, some one hundred nationalities and seventy languages describe the opportunities and challenge before us. Our cultural richness makes us a unique jewel with the potential to show forth the splendor and universal binding force of Gospel truth. Culture is the unique way we relate to God, nature and one another. It is articulated through tradition, language, food, music and religious expression. It envelopes the whole of life. Each of us relates to others and worships God through and within a particular culture. It is for this reason that, as Bishop, I am concerned that a mandate already in effect be faithfully implemented, i.e., the mandate that young men in training for priesthood become conversant with at least one other language and culture than his own; and that all priests develop a sensitivity and interest, in so far as is possible, to learn enough about other cultures to be able to minister appropriately to persons who seek their ministry.

In Catechesi Tradendae (#53) our Holy Father exhorts us to imbue all cultures with the spirit of the Gospel that people may reflect on their lives, making what they are used to fully alive with the truth of the Holy Spirit. This important process is called "inculturation." The Catechism lays the responsibility for this process at our doorstep: "By design, this catechism does not set out to provide the adaptation of doctrinal presentations and catechetical methods required by differences of culture, age, spiritual maturity, and social and ecclesial conditions among those to whom it is addressed. Such indispensable adaptations are the responsibility of particular catechisms and, even more, of those who instruct the faithful" (#24). How can we accept this responsibility without a concerted effort to know the cultures we serve and be sensitive to the differences among the peoples we are called to serve?

Liturgy and devotional practices are the sources for strength and expression of faith. Here, too, the process of inculturation invites our imagination and energy. Listen to the Catechism once more: "The celebration of the liturgy ... should correspond to the genius and culture of the different peoples. In order that the mystery of Christ be `made known to all the nations ... to bring about the obedience of faith,' it must be proclaimed, celebrated, and lived in all cultures in such a way that they themselves are not abolished by it, but redeemed and fulfilled" (#1204). Again: "In addition to the liturgy, Christian life is nourished by various forms of popular piety, rooted in the different cultures. While carefully clarifying them in the light of faith, the Church fosters forms of popular piety that express an evangelical instinct and a human wisdom and that enrich Christian life" (#1679).

These last two quotations from the Catechism clarify the notion of "inculturation." It is not mere adaptation. That would be easy. Rather it involves getting into the very heart of the culture and transforming it in the light of the Gospel. Here we can see the absolute necessity of identifying and enlisting the assistance of leaders within the ethnic, racial and cultural groups we serve, those who know their people and cultures from the inside and can help us to articulate accurately their hopes and aspirations.

Each culture, transformed, can come to appreciate the richness and value of other cultures as vehicles of Gospel value and as fulfilling to the groups whose cultures they are. Inter-cultural, inter-racial and inter-ethnic harmony will have moved "light years" toward realization when the work of inculturation has begun and caught the attention and interest of people. Here I appeal to my brother priests to work tirelessly in the interest of bringing about the unity of our family in faith, respecting and celebrating the diversity of their gifts, and encouraging that they be put at the service of cross-cultural, cross-racial and cross-ethnic enrichment.

The Diocesan Convocation held at the Immaculate Conception Center on December 3, 1994 probed the damage of racism on both the victim and the victimizer. The Lenten penance services and homiletic outlines that issued from that convocation reminded us that prejudicial attitudes often creep into our thinking, ingested from the social structures around us, ingrained by years unexamined and unconscious acceptance, latent but ready to explode into action, word or attitude when some "trigger" moment arises. Our purpose remains an attempt to raise consciousness of this evil within us and within our societal structures that it may be exorcised. Let us look then at this "structure of sin."

II

"Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted." (Mt. 5:5)

In Created in the Image of God I wrote that "Racism is not merely attitudinal but structural and systematic ... We must pay attention to the way our society is structured. Far too often people are penalized because of their race or their cultural background." It is this structuralism I wish, now, to develop with you.

The notion of social or structural sin is a relatively new concept, and our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, has become its most forceful theoretician, developing the idea philosophically and theologically.

Without intending a complete history of the concept, we may well assign its present importance to the Medellin Conference of Latin American bishops in 1968. This conference called for a conversion that was not just an appeal to individuals, but to a new way of viewing the social structures that oppressed vast numbers of people while being of advantage to relatively few; it called, also, for a whole new way of thinking about social issues and responding with reformed social structures.

German political theology took up the call asking for a recovery of the social dimension of the Christian message.⁽²⁾ Sin is not just a private affair. It is all too alive in the societal structures: produced by a few; exploitative of the many.⁽³⁾

The theme found a home in the teachings of many episcopal conferences. In 1971, the World Synod of Bishops recognized sin "in its individual and social manifestations," affirming the power of the Gospel to free people "from sin and from its consequences in social life," recognizing a "network of domination, oppression and abuse" that keeps the greater part of the human family excluded from power and nature's resources.

The Canadian bishops called rampant unemployment a "moral evil" and labeled it "symptomatic of a basic moral disorder."⁽⁴⁾ And in our economic pastoral, we American bishops defined that a virulent form of injustice is the structural exclusion of people from political, economic and cultural participation in the good things of the world. Since this injustice results from structures created by free human persons "they can be called a form of social sin."⁽⁵⁾ Again, the Vatican Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (1986) recognized that while sin is primarily a voluntary personal act, one can validly speak of "social sin" and "sinful structures" as sin in the secondary and derived sense, but no less real since it is created by sinful human beings.⁽⁶⁾

These references may offer something of a background of the teaching of our Holy Father in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis On Social Concerns). He entitled chapter 5 "A Theological Reading of Modern Problems" and argues that we can only understand today's troubled world through the category of structural sin: "...a world which is divided into blocs, sustained by regional ideologies, and in which instead of independence and solidarity different imperialisms hold sway, can only be a world subject to structures of sin."⁽⁷⁾ The Holy Father, with reference to his Apostolic Exhortation: Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (1984), answers: they "are rooted in personal sin and thus always linked to concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove. And thus they grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people's behavior.⁽⁸⁾ In a footnote to the text of the encyclical quoted above, referencing the Apostolic Exhortation, the Holy Father warns that not only action, but the failure to counteract or taking refuge in the excuse that one cannot change things are all parts of the "personal sins" that root "structural sin."⁽⁹⁾

The new Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1869) using the same reference teaches: "Structures of sin are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a `social sin.'"

We are clearly being confronted with the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church, that of the Pope and Bishops in union with him, and would be on weak ground theologically to deny the existence of "social sins" or the "structures of sin."

Yet, the word "analogous" in the quotations from the Catechism is intriguing. We have obviously gone beyond the traditional notions of sin as a personal, reprehensible act in contravention of God's law. Here is a category of thought that, even if it is grasped intellectually, may be difficult to own as one's personal experience. "It is sometimes said to be pointless to lecture those who are not personally guilty of causing or directly contributing to racism and other ills in society. But the absence of personal fault for an evil does not absolve one of all responsibility. We must seek to resist and undo injustices we have not caused, lest we become bystanders who tacitly endorse evil and so share in guilt for it."⁽¹⁰⁾

This category of "structural sin" raises the question of guilt, and is often responded to with phrases like: "I don't feel guilty"; "I did not create these structures"; "I am not responsible for the racial injustices of society." How then can one repent them, and why should there be repentance?

Perhaps our traditional notions of sin are incomplete. It happens often that institutions created by people (even, originally with the best of intentions) contain mechanisms that eventually humiliate, devalue, damage, even destroy people. And they remain operative through processes that are both voluntary and involuntary. We live in structures; and we are often blind to the injury they cause. The facile notion of "collective guilt" will not address the real issue and is not likely to be accepted. Our participation is more often involuntary, simply by immersion in our culture. But we do share in this culture. We are spiritually identified with the community that oppresses and we are, therefore, even if unwillingly, participants in the objective burden of oppression laid on others.

How may we respond? Perhaps our letter as American Catholic bishops The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response offers a suggestion and direction for response. The immediate context was the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan, but the call is for an expression of "profound sorrow ... Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future..."⁽¹¹⁾ acts of horror. This sorrow is a first necessary step to creating a cultural and moral climate that can dismantle the structures of social sin. Through "mourning," the attitude Jesus blessed, we may prepare ourselves for the social and political tasks that address the evils of racism and every other form of personal degradation we must abhor in the light of being God's image and recognizing that image in others.

Vatican II acknowledged that we are a sinful Church: "...the Church, embracing sinners in her bosom, is at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, and incessantly pursues the path of penance and renewal."⁽¹²⁾ In constant need of reform, we travel our pilgrim way to the full establishment of the Kingdom of God. The Church is a Church of sinners: sinners by personal choice; and sinners through the common heritage of belonging to a sinful human family. But the Church is holy: holy in its Founder, holy in Mary and the Saints, holy in the Sacraments, instruments of transforming grace and strength for all of us.

"Since sinful structures are often blessed by an appropriate ideology and assimilated into the cultural consciousness, they become invisible. Love and good will alone will not reveal them. It is through moments of interruption, disturbing events that shatter our perceptions, that we discover the human damage done by our taken-for-granted world."⁽¹³⁾ Have we not had enough examples of this disruption in the violence in our streets, the personal isolation of lives in our crowded City, the depersonalization of individuals because of the accidents of color, language, economic or social conditions? God grant that we may mourn sufficiently to become energized to effect a more benign and humane society in which to live in peace with one another; but more, that we may live as brothers and sisters, the renewed images of God.

III

"Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called children of God" (Mt. 5:9)

In 1976, in a pastoral letter To Live in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Reflection on the Moral Life, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops noted the "incomparable worth of every racial and ethnic group," but had to lament "racial antagonisms and discrimination"as "the most persistent and destructive of evils in our nation."⁽¹⁴⁾ We mentioned Hispanic, black and native Americans. If we were writing today, we would certainly include Asian Americans among our concerns. In our letter of 1979: Brothers and Sisters to Us, we condemned every form of discrimination against individuals and groups: based on race, ethnicity, national or cultural origins. We labeled this discrimination as seriously unjust and a source of severely weakening our social fabric and depriving our country of the unique contributions minorities can and want to make.⁽¹⁵⁾

Later in the same letter we described racism as "a distortion at the very heart of human nature."⁽¹⁶⁾ In strong language we affirmed "...the sin of racism defies the image of God and degrades the sacred dignity of humankind which has been revealed by the mystery of the Incarnation. Let all know that it is a terrible sin that mocks the cross of Christ and ridicules the Incarnation. For the brothers and sisters of our Brother Jesus Christ are brother and sister to us."⁽¹⁷⁾

Repeatedly calling attention to the sinfulness of racism and every form of discrimination has its purpose. We have to search for ways to eradicate it from our own lives and our corporate life as Church. How best to accomplish such a task?

Our Holy Father, speaking at Battery Park here in New York City in 1979, offered this advice: win freedom every day, ratify it by rejecting whatever would wound it. Getting specific, he said: "Break open the hopeless cycles of poverty and ignorance that are still the lot of too many of our brothers and sisters; the hopeless cycles of prejudice that linger on despite enormous progress toward effective equality in education and employment; the cycles of despair in which are imprisoned all those that lack decent food, shelter or employment."⁽¹⁸⁾ Poverty, ignorance, homelessness, hunger and unemployment are fruits of prejudice since "Today's racism flourishes in the triumph of private concern over public responsibility, individual success over social commitment, and personal fulfillment over authentic compassion ... racism also exists in the attitudes and behavior of some who are themselves members of minority groups."⁽¹⁹⁾ Pandemic, the evil must be stamped out and Christian justice and love prevail.

As I put the finishing touches to this pastoral letter, I am engaged, with my assistant Bishops, in the celebration of the Sacrament of Confirmation. The Catechism, quoting Vatican II, calls this Sacrament an instrument by which the Christian is "more perfectly bound to the Church and enriched with a special strength of the Holy Spirit. Hence they are, as true witnesses of Christ, more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith by word and deed" (#1285). It is this obligation I would now address.

In the ceremony in which Confirmation is celebrated, the candidate and all present renew their baptismal promises. How loudly and willingly they respond to the questions "Do you renounce Satan ... his works ... and his empty promises?" "I do," they say. But that is easy, is it not, since the questions appear so abstract? Who would not reject the archenemy of God and one's own spiritual life; or his works? And, who would desire anything known to be `empty'? But, let us look at these questions more deeply and put flesh on them. Let us see these questions in the light of our own lives and the topic of this pastoral letter.

Satan became the name of the devil rather late in biblical history, in 1 Chronicles 21:1 and in the New Testament. In Job 1-2, Satan (mentioned with the use of the definite article) is found in God's royal court, the accuser or tester of the fidelity of human beings. Here, the question "Do you reject Satan?" invites us to look into our own lives for the source of temptation to prejudice and to root out the selfishness, the unexamined prejudices that make us view others as inferior on the basis of race, ethnicity or any other characteristic we do not understand and fear. Enfleshed in this way, how quick would our answer be -- Do you reject this Satan?: the satan of fear, of rumor, of difference from me in some merely accidental way, of seeming a threat to my neighborhood and/or property values, of preferential treatment I attribute to a mindless use of affirmative action? And how realistic are those fears? Are they things I have experienced or are they things the mythical "everyone" has convinced me are reality? It is only by identifying my own Satan, that which tempts me and blurs my vision of reality, that I can honestly answer the question the liturgy puts forward and accept my obligation to witness to Gospel truth.

"Do you reject Satan's works?" Again, identify those works: racial stereotypes, racial slurs, racial jokes, insensitivity and complicity by action, inaction or indifference to the social and structural sins we spoke of above. Identifying the specific works of Satan makes my response realistic and sincere.

"Do you reject Satan's empty promises?" What makes them empty is that they offer personal fulfillment that is empty because it is personally demeaning — to myself as agent, to others as the objects of mistreatment. We have all become experts at rationalizing and excusing ourselves. "I am not prejudiced, but what can I do?" is a typical ploy. Learn what you can do and cooperate with the political and ecclesial structures that will help to redress past injustices and create more hopeful and helpful structures in the future.

I would ask that the work of the Diocesan Committee for Racial Harmony become a priority issue in every parish. Reviewing the history of these five years past, the statistics on parish involvement in holding meetings to examine the issue as it exists in the parish are rather disappointing; and the statistics on the numbers of involved parishioners are less than I might have hoped for. But the quality of what has been accomplished is very heartening.

IV

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice; they shall have their fill." (Mt. 5:6)

In practical response to all we have contemplated here:

I call upon my clergy to preach frequently and pointedly about this important issue of racial and ethnic harmony;

I ask that Liturgies frequently include petitions for racial harmony in the Prayer of the Faithful;

I ask parishes to effect the very useful program of "twinning," i.e., a parish of predominantly one ethnic or racial make-up uniting in discussion and social relationship with a parish of different racial or ethnic constituency;

I call upon the educational establishment of the diocese, the Office of Catholic Education and the parish schools, and the Office of Religious Education, to explore and implement (where this has not as yet been done) age and grade appropriate curricula on racism;

and I direct The Tablet to be alert to the issues of racism and prejudice, taking a firm stand in accurate and unbiased reporting and editorial comment. The secular media has frequently exacerbated racial tension with biased reporting or failure to explore all of the facts objectively. The Tablet must continue to be my and our instrument to effect change, to keep the Diocese accurately informed as to what is happening in our diocese, city, nation and world.

This letter, like its predecessor, is published in close proximity to our celebration of the Patronal feast of our Diocese and Nation, the feast of Our Lady under Her title of the Immaculate Conception. May She help us to remove the `macula' (stain) of our sins of racism, and help us to realize the desire of Her Son: "Father, may they be one in Us, as You are in Me and I am in You, so that the world may believe that You sent Me."⁽²⁰⁾ May the immaculate heart of Mary cleanse us from the prejudices that mar the image of God we are called to be, and make us over into the image of Her Son to love one another as He has loved us.

Most Reverend Thomas V. Daily, D.D.
Bishop of Brooklyn

December 10, 1995

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¹ Available upon request from the Chancery Office, 75 Greene Avenue, P.O. Box C, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202

² cf. J.B. Metz, Theology of the World, N.Y. Seabury Press, 1973, pp. 107-124

³ cf. Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation, N.Y. Paulist Press, 1975, pp. 199-204

⁴ For an extended summary, cf. G. Baum, Essays in Critical Theology, Sheed & Ward, 1994, p. 190ff

⁵ Economic Justice for All, 1986, no. 77

⁶ no. 75

⁷ no. 36

⁸ ibid.

⁹ cf. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 36, footnote 65. In his recent encyclical Evangelium Vitae, no. 59, the Holy Father again attributes threats to innocent life to this phenomenon: "We are facing what can be called a `structure of sin' which opposes human life not yet born." Veritatis Splendor (August 1993) in chapter 2, especially paragraphs 46-50 describes modern "structures" of ethical thinking that help us to understand "structures of sin."

¹⁰ American Bishops' pastoral To Live in Christ Jesus, no. 71

¹¹ no. 302

¹² The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, no. 8

¹³ G. Baum, Essays in Critical Theology, pp. 202-203

¹⁴ no. 70

¹⁵ no. 8

¹⁶ no. 30

¹⁷.no. 36

¹⁸ Quoted in Brothers and Sisters to Us, no. 35

¹⁹ cf. Brothers and Sisters to Us, no. 22

²⁰ Jn. 17:21