One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice

One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice
ISBN-10
0190618973
ISBN-13
9780190618971
Series
One in Christ
Category
Religion
Pages
302
Language
English
Published
2018
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Karen J. Johnson

Description

When Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in the Chicago Freedom Summer of 1966, he joined a movement more than forty years in the making. Lay Catholics, not bishops and priests, drove the painstaking, gradual development of Catholic commitment to civil rights through relationships and institutionsthat crossed parish and racial boundaries. Since the 1910s, when they began migrating to Chicago, African Americans had called on the Church to practice its universal theology by treating black Catholics the same as all other Catholics. But Jim Crow came north, manifesting itself in churches,economies, education, employment, and relationships. The hierarchy failed to seize the prophetic moment, reinforcing the discriminatory and segregationist dynamics developing in the city.This book tells the story of Catholic activists' struggle to make the Church's practices line up with its theology. Black activists found a handful of white laypeople, some of whom became priests, who believed in their vision of a universal church in the segregated city.Together, they began to embody what they called interracial justice, which meant ending economic, housing, educational, and religious discrimination, all while knitted together in sometimes-contentious friendship as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. Chicago was a vital laboratory in whatbecame a national story.One in Christ traces the development of Catholic interracial activism from the ground up, 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 forreligion.

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