Today, the images of Catholic priests and nuns marching in 1960s
civil rights protests are iconic. Their cassocks and habits clothed
the movement in sacred garments. But by the time of those protests
Catholic Civil Rights activism already had a long history, one in
which the religious leadership of the Church played, at best, a
supporting role. Instead, it was laypeople, first African Americans
and then, as they found white partners, black and white Catholics
working together, who shaped the movement regular people who, in
self-consciously Catholic ways, devoted their time, energy, and
prayers to what they called "interracial justice," a vision of
economic, social, religious, and civil equality. Karen J. Johnson
tells the story of Catholic interracial activism from the bottom up
through the lives of a group of women and men in Chicago who
struggled with one another, their Church, and their city to try to
live their Catholic faith in a new, and what they thought was more
complete and true, way. Black activists found a handful of white
laypeople, some of whom later became priests, who believed in their
vision of a universal church in the segregated city. Together, they
began to fight for interracial justice, all while knitted together
in sometimes-contentious friendship as members of the Mystical Body
of Christ. In the end, not only had Catholic activists lived out
their faith as active participants in the long civil rights
movement and learned how to cooperate, and indeed love, across
racial lines, but they had changed the practice of Catholicism.
They broke down the hierarchy that placed priests above the laity
and crossed the parish boundaries that defined urban Catholicism.
Chicago was a vital laboratory in what became a national story. One
in Christ traces the development of Catholic interracial activism,
revealing the ways religion and race combined both to enforce
racial hierarchies and to tear them down, and demonstrating that we
cannot understand race and civil rights in the North without
accounting for religion.
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