Call to Action speaker proposes theology to combat racism

By DENNIS CODAY
Milwaukee, Wis.

When it comes to racism, Catholic theologians have failed the church, Jon Nilson said during a Saturday afternoon conference at the Call to Action convention.

An associate professor of theology at Loyola University in Chicago, Nilson quoted Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, saying that theology is meant to interpret culture for religion and religion for culture. Thus, he said, “A distorted culture matrix” -- which Nilson identified as racism – “has the power to obscure and twist the heart of the gospel.”

Call to Action met in Milwaukee, Nov. 2-4 under the theme, “From Racism to Reconciliation: Church Beyond Power and Privilege.” About 2,000 people attended and most of its 52 chapters were represented.

To develop an “accurate and intimate understanding of the culture” they live in, Nilson said, theologians have to be reading the best sociological, historical and political science scholarship available.

“But this is the work we theologians haven’t done,” Nilson said in the workshop titled “Living in Sin.” We simply assume that because we live in the United States we understand American culture. We don’t. We don’t.”

“Meanwhile, segregation tightens its grip on our children, the quality of life differential between blacks and whites continues to remain huge, and the Christian resources for social transformation go untapped, because the theologians have not been sufficiently alert to and working for that kind of mediation,” he said.

Nilson’s book Hearing Past the Pain: Why White Catholic Theologians Need Black Theology will be published by Paulist Press in January.

Nilson also said it may be time to re-examine how theologians are educated. He noted that many Catholic colleges and universities offer -- especially for undergraduates -- service opportunities and emersion programs among the disadvantaged people in the schools’ neighborhoods, other places in the United States and in other countries. The programs have “profoundly changed students’ understanding of the world they live in,” he said.

“I wonder if it is too radical to suggest that Catholic graduate theological education also include a significant measure of service learning, too,” he said. “Maybe such experiences should be deemed essential in a tenured Catholic professor of theology.”

A pastoral plan of all
Nilson noted that a number of bishops have addressed racism in pastoral letters. He noted Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Bishop Dale J. Melczek of Gary, Ind. (Other bishops’ letters where mentioned in other workshops during the weekend.) Nilson said he didn’t want to denigrate any of these important contributions, “but I want to say that the church can do better. We can do a lot better, and the way we can do better doesn’t have to be invented.”

He said we should use the models of “The Challenge of Peace” and “Economic Justice For All,” pastoral letters released by the U.S. conference of bishops in 1983 and 1986 respectively.

“The U.S. bishops in the 1980s were inspired by Pope Paul VI’s admonishment to the world’s bishops to reflect, judge and act on the social teaching of the church and to shine the light of the gospel on critical issues in their home countries.

“The U.S. bishops turned their attention to the questions of peace and economic justice.

“They understood that gospel resources could benefit the nation and the church immensely, but only if the tone and the content of that teaching took account of the complexity of the issues and the diversity of American political and religious opinion.

“So they developed a process for these pastoral letters that was consultative, participative and dialogical,” Nilson said. “The bishops didn’t go off into a room by themselves. They consulted widely; they called in experts from across the ideological spectrum.

“It was participatory. They put out drafts of their work and asked for comments. The bishops in effect were saying, ‘We don’t have all the answers; help us.’ And they took those responses seriously. They amended the texts as appropriate.

“The letters were powerful teaching, but the process itself was very powerful too because the process demonstrated the church’s convictions about the serious of the peace issue and the seriousness of the economic justice and demonstrated the church’s determination to resolve them.”

He continued, “That was a great time for being a Catholic. I was so proud, so proud and so happy that here was a church confident in its own resources and fully committed to the gospel.”

“And non-Catholics saw the Catholic church not turned in on itself but collaborating with all people of good will to grapple with critical issues of human survival and fellowship.”

Nilson said the church needs a similar process to address racism.

“If racism is America’s original sin -- as [James H.] Cone and others have persuasively argued -- than I think racism deserves at least the same attention, effort and time as did the issues of peace and economic justice in the early 1980s.”