By Mike James
In Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, countries with significant proportions of populations which trace roots back to Africa and India, the issue of racial equality and rights has recently become a hot topic of debate (again).
So what is the position of the Catholic Church in the region and internationally on this sensitive, often divisive issue?
The Antilles Bishops in 1969, well before the Black Power uprising in Trinidad whose 41st anniversary took place last week, issued a statement to the people of the region in which they rejected the interpretation of “Black Power” as “a philosophy of license to hatred and violence” but declared that such a philosophy is basically Christian if it is “a cultural force which is devised to awaken in all a sense of their universal brotherhood – a political and economic programme which is intended to put an end to a history of degradation and minimal progress for black people.”
Quoting from their Statement on Black Power in the landmark 1975 Pastoral Letter “Justice and Peace in a New Caribbean” the AEC Bishops renewed “the offer we made on that occasion to: ‘work together to build bridges of true brotherhood, to enhance a sense of personal dignity among all our people and to establish true social justice in our lands’. We make this offer not only in the context of the Black Power movement, but also with regard to other forms of racism within the area. Recent Church documents have strongly emphasised that there is no place in Christian teaching for racial prejudice of any sort. In this they are re-echoing the words of St. Paul who proclaimed that, for the follower of Christ:
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‘There is no more distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female but all of you are one in Jesus Christ’.
“It is both morally and scientifically wrong,” affirmed the Bishops, “to consider any one race to be naturally superior or inferior to any other. And in this technological age, when humans can exploit atomic energy and walk on the moon, it is utterly ridiculous that the colour of a person’s skin should affect the way in which he is treated.” (Full text available on line at http://www.aecrc.org/documents/Justice and Peace in a New Caribbean.pdf).
On this fundamental principle the Caribbean bishops echo the teaching of the universal Catholic Church:
“The equality of all rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:
Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, colour, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design. (Vatican II Council Document: The Church Today (29) also cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church Art 1935)
“Access to employment and to professions must be open to all without unjust discrimination: men and women, healthy and disabled, natives and immigrants. For its part society should, according to circumstances, help citizens find work and employment.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church Art 2433).
