As a Jesuit priest, I stand in solidarity with the people lost to armed violence this year, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and many others. I stand with those who stood with them in life and with those who now stand with them in death.
Racism, as St. John Paul II said, is one of the most “persistent and destructive evils” in the United States. It is also a social sin—that is, a sin that is committed not only by individuals, but which is part of the social structure in which all Americans live. And I have to acknowledge my own participation in it: as an American who has benefited from white privilege and who lives with the legacy of slavery, as a Catholic who lives with the legacy of a church that has failed to give the sin of racism the attention it demands in this country and as a Jesuit priest whose religious order in this country once owned men and women as slaves.
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