Like the disciples in the days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, white American Catholics find ourselves trapped in an upper room of confusion, guilt, shame, denial, anger, and fear when it comes to facing racism in our country and our Church.  No matter how good our intentions, we cannot work for racial justice from these confining spaces without first seeking racial mercy: probing the wounds of the Resurrected Christ amidst the suffering of racial violence and inequality, desiring to be healed of the wounds of racism we too carry, professing a willingness to always begin again where undoing racism is concerned and claiming the unique gifts offered by the Spirit in the still unfolding multicultural event of Pentecost.

This program will assist participants in cultivating the virtue of racial mercy by: 

• Exploring definitions and types of racism, particularly white racism or white supremacy.
• Uncovering a long history of racist ideas and practices in our country and in our Catholic Christian tradition;
• Identifying the impact of racism on our own identify formation and faith development.
• Encountering the wounds of racism in our own enspirited bodies.
• Engaging in personal reflections and group activities that will help us become anti-racists and people of racial mercy working with others toward racial justice. 

Resource Person:  Maureen H. O’Connell, PhD, After eight years in the Theology Department at Fordham University, Maureen H. O’Connell returned in 2013 to her native city of Philadelphia to Chair the Department of Religion at LaSalle University where she is also an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics. Maureen holds a BA in History from Saint Joseph’s University and a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. She authored Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009) and  If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012), which won the College Theology Book of the Year Award in 2012 and the Catholic Press Association’s first place for books in theology in 2012. Her current research project explores the interplay of being Catholic and “becoming white” across five generations of her family’s history in the City of Philadelphia, as well as racial identity formation in Catholic higher education. 

She serves on the boards of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, and Rosemont College, PA. She is a member of St. Vincent De Paul parish in Germantown, where she is also a member of POWER (Philadelphians Organizing to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild). POWER is an interfaith federation of more than 50-faith communities committed to making Philadelphia the city of “just love” (as well as “brotherly love and sisterly affection”) through more just wages for workers, fair funding for public schools, immigration reform and de-carceration. O’Connell is also a collaborator with colleagues from three other Catholic universities in “POWER University,” a cohort of 40 students, faculty, and staff partnering with POWER and working to bring models of social transformation through community organizing to their respective campus communities.

      Recommended Readings:

• Barndt, Joseph. Becoming the Anti-racist Church: Journeying Toward Wholeness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011) 

• Douglas, Kelly Brown.  Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2015).

• Massingale, Bryan.  Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010).