The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations Quotes

“The Mass is the re-enactment of the cross’s mighty onslaught upon human differences: the breaking down of the wall of partition. We participate in common, as in one family, in the holy Eucharistic offering. We are united with one another through our union with Jesus Christ in Communion.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Deep wounds are not easily healed. But the Good Samaritan poured oil and wine into the wounds of the stranger who lay helpless on the road to Jericho, and set him on the road to recovery. Each one of us can go and do likewise.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Discriminatory barriers in housing seem to be almost the sine qua non of prejudice. Men reflect their true values, ideas, and attitudes, most directly in the intimate primary realm of living that surrounds the home. Discriminatory barriers in housing are strong because they are probably the last citadel for those basic attitudes of racial antipathy which … still exist in the minds of the majority of white people. The idea of integration in housing directly challenges this citadel and the attitudes it represents. Integration in housing, therefore, has much deeper implication than integration in any other area of social intercourse.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“The apostle of interracial justice among highly prejudiced fellow citizens resembles in many ways the missionary conversing with a foreign people bound by ancient tribal customs and taboos. Direct assault will not dislodge the fetishes. The idols will bow out only when people have become sufficiently enlightened to wish to remove them of themselves.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“The problem of racial minorities, more than ninety years after the Emancipation Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, is still our country’s number-one problem. It touches upon every phase of our national economy, health and security, religion and culture. Most of us do not care to discuss it, for we feel uneasily that it reveals an ugly cleavage of thought among our fellow citizens.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“After the big holidays each year – such as Labor Day or the Fourth of July – the statisticians announce the total of lives lost on the nation’s highways through reckless driving. The public shudders, parents warn their young, and committees ponder as to how to prevent such a waste of human life. Yet the highway casualties are trifling in comparison with the human waste caused by unresolved racial conflicts in this country.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Certain roads lead nowhere; they are dead ends and blind alleys. Such a dead end, such a blind alley, is the path of racial segregation. Despite all fine talk and attempts to idealizing, despite any use or justification it had or may have had in earlier times and under earlier conditions, today it leads but into a cul-de-sac. Its pursuit breeds disorders infinitely greater than any evils which it seeks to avoid.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“The distinctions of body and blood among men are transcended by unity with the Body and Blood of Christ.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Those who live, racially speaking, in a fool’s paradise will one day suffer from a painfully rude awakening.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Some years ago I talked to a clever young Northern businessman, who prides himself on his culture, yet was shocked that Yale’s football team had chosen a Negro, Levi Jackson, as its captain. Such a mind, with all its outward trappings of modernity and elegance, is completely out of tune with the real world.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“A homogenous, hand-picked congregation where people are mutually conformable in all their minor social ways is agreeable. It makes parish life smoother. But to require such conformity is entirely un-Catholic; it is contrary not only to the spirit of the Catholic Church in general, but to the tradition of the Catholic Church in the United States.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“If the Negro or any other type of citizen needs to be kept in his place, what is that place and please define it? If it means that people who have not yet attained a certain degree of culture must put up with the consequences of their own backwardness, we can naturally agree. But it is entirely illogical if it means that they are to be permanently consigned to an inferior status regardless of what degree of culture they may have attained. It is contrary to the entire tradition of American democracy to hold, even implicitly, that persons should be discouraged from emerging from a lower degree of culture or from developing the talents which they have received from the Creator.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“It is anomalous, for instance, that in our big cities we think nothing of living next door, possibly in the same apartment house, to person whose family life is completely reprehensible according to our Catholic or Christian standards, as long as they do not molest us personally. Yet we become acutely disturbed at the presence of a well-bred, educated, law-abiding, neighborly family, merely because of the color of their skin.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“It is an anomaly, for instance, that in a democracy like ours a newly landed immigrant in this country who has been with us only a few hours has more civil rights to his credit, even though still an alien, than one whose citizenship is rooted for several generations back. Yet an American citizen, a product of our schools, our culture, our entire United States civilization, an old American, in a very true sense, must still struggle for elementary rights, simply because he is identified in the popular mind with people who were once in a condition of servitude.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“It is just as reprehensible to practise a racism in reverse as it is to show the more familiar type of racial prejudice. The individual must lay aside not only his dislike of people of another culture or appearance but his own sensitiveness and clannishness as well.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“In our own generation, as never before, there is need to demonstrate that Christianity is capable of bringing mankind into a truly universal society based not on fear and compulsion but on mutual love. To manifest the unitive power of Christian charity we must make faithful use of the means of unity which Christ has provided for His church. Among these the Eucharist holds a place of honor as the supreme source and symbol of Catholic unity.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“A parish is no longer a really Catholic parish in spirit if on the grounds of race it bans any people from its ministrations or treats them in matters that belong to the parish as minors or unequals.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“There is a certain finality about integration in housing in relation to the whole race relations problem. Many believe that when integration in housing is common, the race-relations problem will have been dealt its death blow. From this point of view, housing has always been the central issue in race relations, the final acid test which race relations progress must meet.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“It is commonly observed how people can participate in impersonal situations where racial justice prevails, yet in other situations still hold the most unjust racial attitudes. It is almost impossible, however, to conceive of practising racial justice in the intimate institutions of home and neighborhood and at the same time harboring unjust racial attitudes.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“Work for interracial justice is of its own nature interracial. It bespeaks the co-operation of both races, not in a merely formal, “token” fashion, but as a genuine and sincere co-operation, based upon real friendship and personal, day-by-day collaboration.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“The disadvantages that afflict the members of a given racial group cannot be treated merely as the concern of the disadvantaged group alone: they can only be treated adequately and successfully by the joint action of all concerned.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

“In spite of good intentions, the net effect of Negro solidarity proved to be a tremendous obstacle to integration in Catholic life. A separatist organization was not in a very strategic position to protest against separatism.”
― John LaFarge S.J., The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations