The Catholic Church and racism, 5 years after George Floyd

(OSV News) -- Five days after the police-involved, Memorial Day murder of George Floyd in 2020, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, knelt in El Paso's Memorial Park amid a group of priests, closed his eyes and prayed.

He held a white rose and a sign with simple lettering: Black Lives Matter.

A photo of the moment spoke volumes to those seeking solidarity from Catholic leaders amid the national grief, anger and turmoil that followed Floyd's May 25 death amid an arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 by four Minneapolis police officers.

Five years later, there is much work still to be done in the church to address the sin of racism, Bishop Seitz and other U.S. Catholic leaders told OSV News.

On the evening of May 25, 2002, a white officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of 46-year-old Floyd, who was Black, as Floyd laid handcuffed on the ground, repeating that he couldn't breathe and calling for his mother. Chauvin continued kneeling on Floyd's neck after he lost consciousness, even amid calls from the gathered crowd to help Floyd. An officer checked for Floyd's pulse, found none, but no officer gave medical aid. Floyd was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Chauvin was found guilty of murder in 2021; the other officers were convicted of lesser, related charges.

The officers' indifference to Floyd's suffering was immediately understood as racially motivated. In the following days, horror and anger over Floyd's death -- which bystanders filmed and shared online -- led both to public large demonstrations calling for justice, as well as looting, rioting and violence in cities across the United States.

In Minneapolis, demonstrators burned down a police station in the vicinity of Floyd's murder and set other fires in that city and in neighboring St. Paul, Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz called in the state's National Guard to restore public order. Floyd's funeral drew major civil rights activists, politicians and celebrities.

Even an American ministering as a bishop in Peru retweeted a prayer for Floyd, his family and peace, originally posted by Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia. That bishop in Peru became Pope Leo XIV May 8.

Within days of Floyd's death, Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis called for citywide prayer and joined an ecumenical gathering of faith leaders June 2 at the South Minneapolis intersection where Floyd died. Over the following months, Archbishop Hebda and local Catholic pastors would continue calls for peace and racial healing. He also celebrated a special Mass for peace and justice in Minnesota in April 2021 as jury deliberations began in Chauvin's trial.

Those efforts ultimately contributed to the founding of the Catholic Racial Justice Coalition, a group that includes the archdiocese and several partner institutions in the Twin Cities committed to racial justice initiatives.

Floyd's death received international attention, with Pope Francis at a June 3, 2020, general audience praying "for the repose of the soul of George Floyd and of all those others who have lost their lives as a result of the sin of racism." The late pope denounced both racial injustice and violent and destructive demonstrations. Later that year, he drew attention to what he called "the horrendous police killing of George Floyd" in his book "Let Us Dream."

Pope Francis also called Bishop Seitz in 2020 to commend him for showing solidarity with people who were suffering. Speaking with OSV News May 21, the El Paso bishop said he prayed the rosary at that El Paso park for people suffering from racial prejudice and for peace during a local demonstration scheduled to take place there. He did not join the demonstration itself.

"The killing of George Floyd horrified me," he said. "It was something that really caused all of us in the church to pause and say, 'Is it possible that even today somehow, some lives are valued less than others? What was it in the heart of those police officers that led them to such a violent response to this Black man?' I think it was a moment in which we all had to pause and examine ourselves in a certain way and say, 'Is it we have not come any further than this?'"

There is still "serious work that needs to be done" to address racism, especially against people who are Black and brown, said Bishop Sietz. The shepherd of a diocese bordering Mexico and the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration, Bishop Seitz has been a consistent voice for immigrants and the marginalized. He pointed to other racially-motivated acts of violence, and said that in the summer of 2020, it was important to say, "Black lives matter."

In 2020, that position became controversial among Americans, including Catholics. Bishop Sietz acknowledged that the phrase was misused by some people who aligned it with Marxist principles, but he emphasized, "There were hundreds of groups that took that title without being associated with each other." Even as it was politically "misused," for people to reject the phrase "Black lives matter" itself "was also very damaging," he said.

"It was a time in which it was important for people to come together around the understanding that the color of one's skin does not lessen the dignity of the person in that skin," he said. "Black lives matter. And it was important to say, because the truth of the matter was and is, that people of color, primarily Black and brown, have been in the history of our country seen as somehow less than. Their dignity has been denied, and they have been stereotyped ... simply because of the color of their skin. The killing of George Floyd was an important moment for us to face that reality again."

Gloria Purvis, a Catholic media personality who is Black, said that while many Catholic leaders and institutions took and continue to take important stands to denounce the sin of racism in the aftermath of Floyd's death, she has also heard racist rhetoric among Catholic influencers online that has gone unchallenged. And, she said, U.S. Catholics who are not Black seem widely resistant to uncomfortable conversations about race, or truly understanding that racism is a sin.

"I saw a lot of disdain, really, for the topic, for saying, 'Hey, this is wrong.' Or even for the expression of Black people's righteous anger about this. We had the videotaped murder of George Floyd ... and yet, so many people who I know as self-identified Catholic, pro-life people fail to see it as a murder," she said.

In the months and years after Floyd's death, Purvis said priests have preached "ahistorical homilies about lynching, about saying that Black people needed to be grateful to white people that lost their lives during the Civil War."

And when Catholics in the pews said they could not stand with Black Lives Matter organizations because the BLM platforms did not fully align with Catholic teaching, Purvis said Catholics were holding that movement to standards of "impossible purity" to which they did not hold collaborating pro-life organizations with positions unaligned with church teaching. Some also did the same for Black people, she said.

"How do we go from recognizing or claiming we believe in the dignity of the human person from the womb to the tomb, and them being worthy of dignity and respect because they're made in the image and likeness of God, and that very basic teaching could not be embraced unless the person was seen as Jesus -- these impossible standards -- at least when it comes to Black people," she said.

Purvis knows Black Catholics who felt they could no longer worship at their parishes because the lack of empathy they perceived there made Catholics' profession of faith seem like a "lie."

Over the past five years, Purvis thinks the issues around persistent racism in American culture and even the church "were revealed and ignored," but "what gives me hope is that I know the battle is already won."

"Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead to give us a chance at heaven," she said. "I firmly believe there's always a chance for repentance and reconciliation, and the mercy of God is endless, boundless and deep, and we can't even comprehend it. And it is there, and always will be there, for us."

A week after Floyd's murder, Cynthia Bailey Manns, a spiritual director and the adult learning director at Minneapolis' St. Joan of Arc Parish, a mile-and-a-half from where Floyd was killed, led a prayer service -- virtual, due to continuing social distancing requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview at the time, she said that Floyd's murder reminded her of other police-involved killings of unarmed Black men.

Manns, who is Black, was among four lay delegates from the U.S. to the two sessions of the 2023-2024 meetings of the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican. Manns said she mentioned Floyd's death in small group discussions about racism, because in 2023 she worked with the Minnesota Council of Churches and World Council of Churches to develop materials for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which focused on healing racial injustice.

"Part of that was us naming what needed to happen in our denominations for healing to occur," she told OSV News. "We are still healing from this, and we are mindful of still the work that has to be done within the Catholic Church at large in terms of racism," including connections between the U.S. Catholic Church and African slavery.

Manns echoed something that Bishop Sietz also observed in his comments to OSV News: That listening is an important part of racial reconciliation and healing.

"The whole thing with synodality is just allowing people to share and being present to their sacred stories and honoring them," which, if the Holy Spirit is present, should lead to compassion and empathy, she said.

Bishop Joseph N. Perry, an auxiliary emeritus bishop of Chicago who leads the USCCB's Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, is hopeful about the direction the Catholic Church is headed in addressing racial injustice, especially because young adults seem to take the issue seriously.

"Racism is a sin. It is a moral issue," he said, which is underscored in the U.S. bishops' 2018 pastoral letter on racism, "Open Wide Our Hearts." "It's not in any way a 'shopping mall' option for us, especially as Christians, to be racially biased."

He told OSV News that racial bias in policing as well as economic disparities between race groups are important justice issues that must receive attention. He encourages Catholics to model "the church of Pentecost," where people from all backgrounds came together to hear the Gospel.

"We have this unusual situation that our worship on Sundays is separate," Bishop Perry said. "It is kind of illogical that we worship the Lord in a mono-racial context that is routine, without some attention to dismantle that. ... That all our gatherings and all of our instruction, all our recreation somehow would invite or entail or include people of other backgrounds, other races."

He said, "We cannot be afraid of encounter, and it's in encounter with one another that we are enriched, life is enriched, and grace is possible."