Racial Division and the Eucharist

St. Augustine’s Catholic Church describes their founding on their website: In the 1920's seven Catholic African American families moved to South Bend from Mississippi. Father George O'Connor, CSC, heard about them and started to offer Sunday Mass, first in an out building at St. Joseph Parish and later in a building on the west side of South Bend. In 1928 this became St. Augustine’s Parish.
 
Years ago, while at St. Joseph parish, I gathered with parishioners from both parishes to talk about our shared history. Oral tradition known among the older members of St. Augustine told that African-American Catholics who arrived at St. Joe’s (before or after they worshiped in an “out building,”) were required to sit in the back of the church where they would receive the Eucharist last, after the white parishioners had received. This practice was very likely not unusual in Catholic parishes throughout the U.S.
 
As Catholics, we would wonder if our participation in  communion actually makes us a new body, a body where discrimination has no place. Fr. Bryan Massingale writes in  Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, “The worthy celebration of the Eucharist, the primordial sacrament of unity, cannot but challenge the existence of white privilege and form in believers a counter identity more amenable to attitudes of compassion and risky acts of racial solidarity.”
 
This is the relationship between racial division and the Eucharist – a counter identity formed in a people who then are able to live a radical social inclusion and communion as Christ’s body in the world. –  Regina Wilson
 
Your thoughts? Share with us by email:  sjinfo@littleflowerchurch.org.