"Cardinal repents sins of church." The Baltimore Sun, 6 December 2000.

Cardinal repents sins of church;
Keeler to lead prayer on racism, injustice

by John Rivera
Sun Staff

December 6, 2000

Acknowledging the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church and its members in such social evils as slavery and racial segregation, Cardinal William H. Keeler will lead a prayer of repentance tonight, asking forgiveness for the sins of racism and indifference to the poor.

During a prayer service that begins at 7 p.m. at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at Cathedral and Mulberry streets downtown, Keeler will admit that Catholics "have been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion, consenting to acts of discrimination and even enslavement on the basis of racial difference."

The leader of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Keeler will pray for God's forgiveness for "this grave injustice" and will ask for help to heal the wounds it has caused.

"We're praying that the Lord may forgive these sins against God," Keeler said yesterday in an interview. "I think it's important that we're conscious that there were these failings, and it's important to resolve to purge ourselves of any remains of these habits of thought and action and to truly do better in the future."

Keeler's prayer for forgiveness is modeled on a similar plea earlier this year by Pope John Paul II, who in a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March asked "forgiveness from the Lord for the sins, past and present, of the sons and daughters of the church."

Pope John Paul offered the sweeping acknowledgment of failing as a "purification of memory" for the church's Jubilee Year 2000, commemorating Christianity's second millennium.

During that Mass, the pope singled out Christian mistreatment of the Jews, which drew both praise for its sincerity and criticism for not specifically mentioning the Holocaust.

Keeler joins several other American bishops who have offered prayers of repentance in this jubilee year, including Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles.

The church, indeed, has a spotted record on race. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Jesuit order owned slaves that worked on its plantations. Archbishop John Carroll, the first archbishop of Baltimore, also owned slaves.

Parishes, schools and other Catholic institutions in Baltimore were segregated.

In his history of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, "The Premier See," Thomas Spalding, a member of the Xaverian Brothers religious order, notes that as early as the late 1920s, Archbishop Michael Curley quietly pushed pastors to allow blacks into white congregations, counseling one pastor to ignore the "calamity howl" that would follow. Widespread desegregation would not come for decades.

Desegregation of Baltimore's public schools began in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Desegregation of Baltimore's Catholic schools would not come until 1962, soon after the installation of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Lawrence J. Shehan. Within three years, institutional segregation was banned in all of Baltimore's Catholic institutions.

But individual Catholics did not necessarily buy into the trend.

"The task of uprooting prejudices and patterns of segregation, however, was infinitely less difficult in diocesan institutions than in Catholic neighborhoods, fraternal and social organizations, and the hearts and heads of Catholics long accustomed to a social condition that was largely southern," Spalding writes.

Doretha Barnes, a parishioner at St. Veronica's Church in Cherry Hill, recalls the sting of segregation she experienced while attending St. Adalbert's Church in Wagner's Point as a child.

"We sat in the back of the church," she said. "We were the last to go to communion and anything that happened in the church, we were the last to participate in. Even in Sunday School, the white children were first and we sat behind them."

The church's acknowledgement is long overdue, Barnes said.

"I do feel that Cardinal Keeler is a very good person for doing it," she said. "It should have been done long ago."

The impetus for tonight's prayer for reconciliation comes from a group of Catholics involved in an dialogue between inner-city and suburban parishes called Beyond the Boundaries, which seeks regional solutions to Baltimore's social ills.

It was launched about four years ago by Bishop John Ricard, who has since moved to a diocese in Pensacola, Fla., in response to David Rusk's book "Baltimore Unbound," which held that the city's intractable social problems cannot be solved unless the region's suburban counties pitch in.

"Beyond the Boundaries is an effort to try and raise the consciousness of everyone to the fact that we're interdependent on one another, in a social and political sense, but also in a religious sense," said Bishop Gordon D. Bennett, who now leads the program.

Beyond the Boundaries is driven by a group of priests called the Think Tank who meet regularly to plan strategy.

The Rev. Richard E. Cramblitt, pastor of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington and a member of the think tank, came up with the idea of tonight's prayer service. For him, it was the logical next step in the process of social reconciliation among Baltimore Catholics.

"We have a very long and sad history in this city of racism, and that has affected not just the city, but the entire metropolitan region," he said.

"In all that has happened in our American past, including the issue of slavery in the distant past, no one has stopped to simply say, 'I'm sorry.' Not the government. Not even the church. Nobody," Cramblitt said.

"So it's time for this because we cannot really move forward to build a healthy society unless we acknowledge and own our past, and admit that we have made mistakes and even sinned."