What Does Pope Francis' Visit To The U.S. Mean To African-Americans?

What Does Pope Francis’ Visit To The U.S. Mean To African-Americans And Minorities?

Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States was big news this week in the mainstream media. All week there was lots of talk about his overtly liberal political views on climate change, divorce, gay marriage, and contraception, but very little about his thoughts on social reform in regards to people of color.

“Black folks” might not be the first image to pop into your head when thinking about the Pope or Catholicism, but there ARE black catholics and many of them want to know where the church stands on issues that affect them, i.e. #BlackLivesMatter.

Via IBTimes

While blacks make up a sliver of the nation’s Catholic population, some of the faith’s African-American leaders and adherents said the pope’s message on injustice and inequality was an implicit admonishment that blacks had not yet achieved true social and economic parity with their white counterparts. The pope’s repeated mentions of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. this week during his first trip to the United States was an affirmation of what social justice activists have said for most of the year leading up to his visit — that black lives matter and deserve equal access to the American dream, said some black Catholics.

“I think the pope has already communicated that the voices of the locked out and the left out should be listened to,” said Marc Morial, a lifelong Catholic who is president and CEO of the National Urban League, a black civil rights organization based in New York City. “That’s what the Black Lives Matter movement has been about,” he said, referring to the national social justice movement that first emerged in 2013 as a Twitter hashtag campaign protesting police brutality

…“I don’t expect that [the pope] will go through a checklist of every nuance and political issue,” Morial said by phone Thursday from Washington, D.C. “But are [church leaders] listening and hearing the pope on social justice, and what does that mean going forward?”

To that end, Pope Francis had this to say about the current political structure:

“If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance,” Francis said Thursday to members of the U.S. Congress. Politics should be “an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good,” the pope continued. He added: “I do not underestimate the difficulty that this involves, but I encourage you in this effort.”

In another address made in NYC, Pope Francis spoke on the several of the issues which affect many African-American communities nationwide:

Via NYTimes

“In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the rapid pace of change, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right’ to be there, no right to be part of the city,” Francis said in a Mass before 20,000 at Madison Square Garden. “They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity.”

…He spoke of that divide often during the day, from his first remarks before the United Nations General Assembly, where he called for respect for “those considered disposable because they are only considered as part of a statistic,” to his closing homily’s observation that “big cities also conceal the faces of all those people who don’t appear to belong, or are second-class citizens.”

How do you feel about Pope Francis’ remarks? Do they carry weight with you? Can the pope, along with the Catholic church, help bring about change in the United States in regards to the treatment of minorites?

Image via AP