Congress session: Martin Luther King Jr. and Catholic Social Teaching (Fr. Bryan Massingale)
The first session I went to was about Martin Luther King Jr. and what he REALLY spoke. Fr. Massingale was an excellent speaker, gifted with the ability to shift through the information to the heart of the issues being discussed. MLK (excuse the abbreviations throughout the post) is one of those universally held heroes. Whenever that is the case, it means that aspects of that person’s life have been overlooked by the public. No one’s message is that universally liked. Instead that person’s beliefs get “sanitized” to make it more palatable to the public as a whole. John Paul II is another example of this phenomenon. Most try to forget his strong stances against birth control and married priests when they revere him as a great Pope.
MLK was a big believer in government social programs. Additionally, he had many critical things to say about capitalism and its ability to leave people in the gutter. In many aspects he had sympathies towards certain socialistic thoughts although certainly not all. This part of his legacy has certainly been overlooked by the public.
The other aspect that gets forgotten is how much his message was a Christian one. Although the public likes to think of him as a black leader, he was primarily a Christian pastor who led a Christian movement. As the words of his famous “I have a dream” speech go: “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” To him, ending segregation in the south was all about doing God’s will.
And what stuck me about these things is how true he was to the underlying truths of Jesus Christ, even when that meant re-thinking and re-tooling his message or speaking what was unpopular even in the black community. Fr. Massingale referred to the riots in Watts as a transitional moment in the life of MLK. He hadn’t been exposed to black repression in communities where there was no physical segregation laws. When he saw that black repression existed in communities without physical segregation, he saw that ending segregation required more than changing bus and water fountain policies. That without economic justice, financial segregation would be just as, if not more crippling as, physical segregation. Again, the Christian message was bigger than just busses and water fountains.
And it made me think: what would King have to say today? He was a big fan of government programs. But that was before the day when the radical attack on Christianity in government began. How would he feel about that today? Would he have been able to help stem that radical purge of faith from the public square? If not, would his attitudes have changed to prefer church sponsored programs over government programs?
And it pained me to think that we no longer have his voice. Instead we are stuck with the voices of comically pathetic people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Both people with the ‘Reverend’ title but neither of whom deserve it like MLK did. They are no more ministers than Karl Rove. They are politicians.
So I left the session praying for another MLK to shine in today’s world. To have a powerful black voice that reclaims the Christian message he spoke so boldly. A voice that knows that expediency is a sign of desperation and that desperation is a sign of lack of faith and hope. Because, in the words of St. Paul: If God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom. 8:31)