Mary Adamski: One solution: more benches

VIEW FROM THE PEW

Seeking peace at the end of a day, our eyelids are a screen with flashing images from the past weeks of civil unrest as protestors force us to confront our ugly national sin of racism. Some images are inspiring sights of people of diverse ethnic roots and many hues joined together to demand justice and mourn victims. But scary and sickening is the sight of a cold-eyed killer caught in the act, and the ugly visions of brutality by people who’ve turned away from their vows to be protectors and by others who pervert an honorable cause by turning to theft, arson, assault and murder.

Open your eyes and you find it wasn’t a nightmare; it’s real and it must be confronted in the light. I read about a scene I wish I had seen in person, flocks of Catholic nuns in habits, priests and even bishops in black shirts and Roman collars joining the protests. Dominican Sister Quincy Howard of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, drew the attention of news photographers in the nation’s capital. A white woman in her white habit, she carried her hand-lettered sign, “I repent my racism,” in two days of demonstrations earlier this month. She told Catholic News Service that everyone needs to confront their part in modern day racism.

“Much more needs to happen,” said Sister Leona Bruner of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. “I would like to see the police department take a good look at themselves. I also wish our church would speak out more,” she told a CNS reporter. She participated in a New Orleans diocese march and prayer service for racial justice June 5. She is congregational leader of the order founded in 1842, one of several organized in the 19th century for black women because religious orders of white sisters would not admit them.

There’s a bit of church history that should twinge our communal conscience. It reminds me of another, the public expression of contrition by Georgetown University for participating in slavery, made at a 2018 service attended by some descendants of the slaves. The Jesuit religious order continues to examine its history and conscience with its Slavery History, Memory and Reconciliation Project.

“The Catholic voice as a group, as a family, needs to be heard,” said Father Cornelius Ejiogu, pastor of St. Luke parish in Washington, D.C., an organizer of a June 8 protest. The Catholic News Service reported on the prayer service for black victims of police violence. The African American priest said, “America is torn up by pride and racism and injustice. So we want to use this opportunity to ask God to reconcile us.” Washington diocese auxiliary bishops Roy Campbell and Mario Dorsonville attended the event. Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who is African American, said racism is a deadly virus that must be cured, as he participated in a June 5 online panel discussion sponsored by Georgetown University. He asked listeners to contemplate “How is racism, this silent but deadly virus, passed on to other people? Is it learned at home? Is it transmitted through our structures? How can we protect ourselves; how can we render it ineffective?”

Bishops’ statements

Archbishop Gregory is one of several American bishops who have issued statements or participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations. This paper’s last edition carried the story of the bishop of El Paso, Texas, who “took a knee” in a June 1 event at a public park. Bishop Mark Seitz received a personal call from Pope Francis after a photo of him and his priests kneeling went viral on Twitter. Seven bishops who chair committees of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis saying: “We are broken-hearted, sickened and outraged to watch another video of an African-American man being killed before our very eyes. This is the latest wake-up call that needs to be answered by each of us in a spirit of determined conversion. Racism is not a thing of the past or simply a throwaway political issue to be bandied about when convenient. It is a real and present danger that must be met head on. As members of the church, we must stand for the more difficult right and just actions instead of the easy wrongs of indifference. We cannot turn a blind eye to these atrocities and yet still try to profess to respect every human life.”

In a November 2018 pastoral letter “Open Wide Our Hearts” from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, American prelates acknowledged the church has a long history of racism, particularly in the papal bulls issued in the 1400s and 1500s that legitimatized European explorers who subjugated and enslaved indigenous people in the Americas. The bishops’ statement called upon Catholics to pray for the Holy Spirit “to touch the hearts of all in the United States and to come down upon our criminal justice and law enforcement. Let each and every Catholic, regardless of their ethnicity, beg God to heal our deeply broken view of each other, as well as our deeply broken society.” The bishops drew criticism from Catholic activists and others because it fell short of providing concrete guidance on how to reach Catholics who are involved in white supremacy and racist organizations and causes. At this point, it’s still mostly discussed as an academic exercise in Catholic school classes.

So, back to those Catholic explorers … now you know why statues of Christopher Columbus, formerly known as the heroic discoverer of America, are on the current hit list, along with those of Confederate Army generals, who are being redefined from heroes to traitors in these days of awakened awareness.

Before turning the page on the official church involvement in the issue of the day, there was an enlightening story by the Catholic News Agency, an arm of the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), which is different from the Catholic News Service, an independent American news organization. A June 17 story by the CNA indicates that Catholics might want to be a bit cautious about whose march they are joining. “Black Lives Matter” became a cry for justice after a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer was acquitted of shooting unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the expression is applied around the globe. But the news agency sources said that the battle cry has been taken as a label by different groups. One in particular with an agenda at odds with Catholic teaching is The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation which promotes LGBT and feminist political and social causes. And at least one of its affiliates has incorporated pagan spiritual ritual in its protests, according to the agency report.

Catholic deacon Harold Burke-Sivers of Portland, Oregon, said “marching to protest the inequitable treatment of black people by those in authority — that’s good.” But he said “No Catholic can support the national organization whatsoever” because of its “radical feminist agenda.” The deacon, an African American, is a co-host of an EWTN radio show. Bishop Shelton Fabre, chairman of the conference of U.S. bishops’ committee on racism, told CNA that “Black Lives Matter has a broad agenda covering many social issues, some of which are not in harmony with Catholic teaching. However, on the issue of standing against the injustice of racism, it is my understanding that Catholic social teaching and Black Lives Matter are in accord. We have a responsibility to bring our faith to the public square.”

Tumbling statues

Okay, enough about bishops talking. Now I’m thinking about statues tumbling.

Instead of hauling the tumbled traitors’ images to a landfill, or hiding them in some Confederacy cherishing private place, why don’t they melt them down and make some nice comfortable benches? I’m serious about this, so stop guffawing. In those dramatic spaces in the midst of cities where men on horseback were romanticized, how about planting grass and installing benches. It could be a new cultural thing, a Listening Space, a place where people could talk about their hopes and fears.

No one has been listening to us, isn’t that part of the cry for help and justice? I would personally like a chance to listen. I was trained as a listener, back in the day when journalism colleges existed to produce objective observers rather than launch primadonna participants on the news “stage.” I would come to the conversation as an almost blank slate when it comes to “getting” the black American experience. I grew up in the white bubble of a small Midwestern town where the only people of color were a few Native American kids in high school, an African American barber, and the family of a 442nd Infantry veteran who married a local Norwegian girl after the war. And I didn’t actually know them to talk to. So, other than a very few college classmates, my landscape was monotone — until I moved to Hawaii, the land of people who are a rainbow of colors. I’ve been in a listening mode for decades as a news reporter here, but I confess there’s so much I don’t know.

No matter how rousing the demonstrations have been, all I could think of was “I wish you guys could go find someplace to sit and talk instead of shouting.” After churning the adrenalin out of your system, after the drama of being part of a mass movement, how about adjourning to a quiet place to actually start the conversation which is hundreds of years past due. Wouldn’t it be the beginning of a solution?

We don’t have any statues to melt here but let’s build some benches anyway. Let’s get the Honolulu Police Department to install some at the front of the Honolulu headquarters, which has been known as “Fort Alapai” since it was built, it’s hard to find a more isolating and unfriendly to the public building. When it opened, there was actually a cafeteria open to the public. But it was shut and the doors were locked with a bunker mentality that is so not Hawaii. Better yet, how about opening the door and opening up a listening space for cops and their fellow citizens to talk.

Then, how about more benches in the courtyards of city halls and state capitols? Something really went awry with democracy in the past few years when we found ourselves speechless because the government guys have the gavels and when they pound them, the citizens are required to stop talking.

Speaking of talking, every time that Old Testament reading about the Tower of Babel recycles in the liturgy as it did recently, I remember that I dreamed up an alternate ending to the story. You know the tale, how people got so prideful that they tried to build a tower that would reach heaven so they could be equal to God. He put a stop to it and punished them by “confounding their speech.” It’s a mythical story intended to explain why mankind developed into such a diverse lot, not able to speak to, or understand, each other.

Here’s my idea: what if those folks had dismantled the tower and made benches, then hunkered down to listen to each other, work on understanding each other from the very beginning. I know God would have given them a chance to change their world back.

We’re centuries behind in the effort, but he’ll do the same for us. I do believe.