Issues Page

Pope Benedict XVI warned that racism is alive in modern society, and he urged the church to help overcome all forms of racial intolerance. He said racism today is often tied to economic and social problems. Although such problems may be real, they can never justify racial discrimination, he said Aug. 17. While the pontiff did not mention specific countries, his words had an immediate echo in Italy, where a series of government actions against illegal immigrants have prompted strong debate inside and outside the church. Likewise, the pope said, the church today is made up of people of every race and culture, and part of its mission is to help forge bonds of communion between races.

The Church must lead in transforming social attitudes about gender inequality as part of the fight against HIV/AIDS, said a Christian agency on the closing day of the 17th International AIDS Conference. Gender and gender-based violence have been major themes at this year’s AIDS conference in Mexico City. Earlier at an HIV pre-conference, Kay Warren of Saddleback Church had also called the Church to action on ending gender-based violence. She said like gender-based violence, the Church is everywhere. She urged the Church to speak up for those who have no voice.

Founded during the segregated 1940s, Christ the King and St. Mary's once served two communities: one black, one white. But these days, white worshippers comfortably sit among the mostly black parishioners at Christ the King, and the once all-white St. Mary's attracts a multicultural congregation. That's because both congregations have worked in recent years to erode the racial barriers that once separated the two bodies of believers. The two churches now call themselves the Catholic Community of West Jackson. They share a priest, hold joint religious education classes and earlier this year consolidated their church offices at Christ the King. But Phipps stopped short of calling the cooperative effort a merger. Rather, he said, it's a step toward living like God wants us to - as one.

Nearly a million African-Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails, and a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, if current trends continue. People of good will disagree about the causes of these dramatic figures. Competing explanations include high rates of involvement in crime, differential rates of prosecution through the "war on drugs," racial profiling and inadequate family support. In fact, there is a good deal of documentation to support each of these contentions as at least a part of the explanation for the disparity. While the numbers are distressing, the good news is that there are growing efforts among policymakers at the federal and state level to provide constructive approaches to sort out the causes and address them.

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported yesterday. The report, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, provides a startling new perspective on an epidemic that was first recognized in 1981. Nearly 600,000 blacks are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and up to 30,000 are becoming infected each year. When adjusted for age, their death rate is 2 1/2 times that of infected whites, the report said. Partly as a result, the hypothetical nation of black America would rank below 104 other countries in life expectancy.

Bishop Joseph A. Galante challenged leaders of Catholic pro-life, family life and social justice offices around the country to "tear down our cubicles" and "give up our turf" in order to model collaboration for the rest of the church. The bishop of Camden, N.J. called "Life, Justice & Family: Partners in the New Evangelization." Reminding his audience that the body of Christ includes everyone, from the moment of conception to the "the last breath breathed," the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned and the homeless, the bishop asked, "How can we dishonor, dismember, destroy that body? How can we kill the unborn, bomb the Iraqis, shun the one who is different from us?

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches. They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate. Indeed, for the first time since the women's movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

It was common for pregnant single women in the 1800s to be called "lost, fallen, wayward, and depraved women." Fast forward to 2008 and spend a bit of time online and you'll read statements that refer to the 17 young pregnant high school women in Gloucester, Mass., as "sluts, idiots, harlots, and immoral." This is not progress. We need to move beyond name calling. Let's ask ourselves not only about how we look at vulnerable young women in our society, but let's use those answers to help make a positive difference for them.

The U.S. bishops' 1979 pastoral letter on racism, "Brothers and Sisters to Us," sets out the framework to address the issue in the Catholic Church. In it, the bishops call racism "an evil which endures in our society and in our church." The document calls upon Catholics to undergo conversion in their personal lives as well as in their faith communities to end racism in all its forms. The bishops as a whole have been joined by several local bishops in their admonition. Many have tied the issue of race to poverty and segregation.

This economic downturn is taking a particularly hard toll on women, according to some experts. The reasons: Much of the downturn is focused on the real estate market, where a disproportionately large number of women work, and substantially more women than men have subprime mortgages. But experts point to another cause: Women simply earn less than men, an estimated average of 80 cents for every dollar made by a man. A recent Senate report found that the number of unemployed adult women increased by 20 percent from March 2007 to March 2008, compared with a 17 percent increase among adult men.

For black Americans, the road to political inclusion that has allowed Democratic candidate Barack Obama to make a serious bid for the White House has been long and difficult. After the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in 1863, a series of laws and amendments to the U.S. constitution allowed Hiram Revels to be elected to the senate in 1870 in Mississippi as the country's first African American congressman. But only a small number of black Americans have entered the U.S. senate or become state governors since then and most of those who have found a slot on a presidential ticket had no chance of winning.

The subprime mortgage fiasco is sending tremors through Wall Street and has brought the U.S. economy near (if not into) recession. For African Americans and Latinos -- the primary victims of the debacle -- the mortgage meltdown may widen the considerable gap in wealth that already exists between whites and people of color. Even worse, some proposals to fix the problem of limited access to credit may end up doing more harm than good. As with numerous aspects of American society, there is a wealth gap in this country: According to the Census Bureau, the median net worth of a household headed by a white adult in 2004, the latest year for which data are available, was $118,300, compared with just $11,800 for black-headed households. The bureau also reported that three-fourths of white households owned their homes in 2004, while less than half of black households owned theirs.

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives. The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

Doudou Diene is writing a report will ultimately be presented to the U.N.'s Human Rights Council on signs of American internal injustice. Some members of the council, such as Iran and Cuba, are human-rights abusers that are deeply critical of U.S. intervention in their affairs, and there's ample reason to worry that these countries will use Diene's report as a justification for ignoring pressure to reform. On the other hand, if the U.S. is going to demand the monitoring of other countries, it's going to have to accept the same treatment at home. It won't hurt us to look at ourselves, and our real and continuing problems with racism, in the mirror held up by the international community.

Several leading child welfare groups urged an overhaul of federal laws dealing with transracial adoption today, arguing that African-American children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach meant to encourage their adoption by white families. Recommendations for major changes in the policy were outlined in a report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. "Color consciousness - not 'color blindness' - should help to shape policy development," the report said.

The Rev. John Hagee, the fiery evangelical pastor who endorsed John McCain, issued an apology to Catholics for disparaging remarks he made, including accusing the Roman Catholic Church of supporting Adolf Hitler. The letter received praise from some Catholic leaders but it reintroduced other subjects of Mr. Hagee's inflammatory comments. It also reignited questions about the relationship between Sen. McCain and Mr. Hagee, which has been compared to that of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It was "very big of him to go back and admit he was wrong," said Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United. But it doesn't excuse the divisive remarks made by Mr. Hagee concerning women or comments attributing Hurricane Katrina's wrath on the level of sin in New Orleans, he said.

Shortly after Senator Obama's speech on race this March, a friend likened the racial issue to an old coffee pot that keeps percolating. Every few years something happens to bring the vexed problem bubbling to the surface. Unplugging the percolator requires courageous conversation and frank acknowledgment of the underlying sources of distrust. In hundreds of local efforts across the US, diverse groups of citizens are bridging the traditional boundaries of race, class, and culture. Thousands have engaged in dialogue, symbolic acts of reconciliation, and collaborative problem solving. Organizations such as Everyday Democracy and Hope in the Cities (a project of Initiatives of Change) are facilitating this.

Immigrant restrictionism is stiffing hundreds of thousands of American citizens and legal residents out of their tax-rebate checks. Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money. This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient.

The repercussions of the workplace raid in Postville Monday, the largest single-site raid in the nation, are wrenching on so many levels. Federal immigration agents and other law officers who descended on Agriprocessors Inc., the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, were doing their jobs. They executed search warrants related to criminal activity as well as a civil search warrant for people believed to be in the country illegally. But that does not diminish the painful fallout from escalating raids resulting at least in part from the failure of Congress and the president to repair the nation's broken immigration system. Such raids, though record in size, ultimately do little to resolve how this nation should sensibly regulate immigration levels or how it should address the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, many with children who are U.S. citizens. Voters should make it clear in the 2008 elections that they expect their elected representatives to pass practical, humane reforms.

Congratulations to the Indiana Legislature, whose harsh voter ID law has ferreted out a suspicious bunch who tried to cast ballots without proper identification in the Democratic primary last Tuesday. Who do those old ladies think they are, American citizens? Actually, that's exactly what they are. Several retired nuns who have been voting all their lives were prohibited from casting ballots in South Bend because they didn't have proper ID. The nuns, who live at a convent, went to their polling place on the ground floor. There was absolutely no doubt about their identity, since the poll workers included other nuns from St. Mary's Convent, near the University of Notre Dame.