Catholicism & Racism (Yes, and Baptists too!)

     It should not be a surprise that a catholic priest in Mobile was a racist, nor that there is a statue in Mobile honoring him.

    After all, the same church was unable to see the immorality in slavery, to the point that it owned slaves. 

     Anyway, there is now a move to remove the statue, and one piece of evidence is a comment from that priest, Abram Ryan:

“We hold that the White Race is superior to the Black, as a general principle, and that the Government of the United States and its several subordinate State and Municipal Governments belong to the white people of the land,” he penned in The Banner of the South, a newspaper based in Augusta, Georgia, in 1869. He was the editor of the publication.

In The Banner a few years earlier, Ryan discussed the moral quandary of allowing women the right to vote.

“If suffrage is a natural right, why not be logical and consistent, and extend it to all women, boys, children, and idiots?” he said. “Suffrage, then, being a civil or political privilege … the State, alone, should confer the privilege, and give to the worthy and intelligent the right to vote, without leaving them … to the mercy of the vile herd of ignorant Voudooists.”

                                                                                       Source: an AL.COM story HERE.

 Of  course it was not only The Catholic Church. As The New York Times detailed in a story in 2018, Baptists hands are far from clean:

The first and oldest educational institution of the Southern Baptist Convention disclosed in a report Wednesday that its four founders together owned more than 50 slaves, part of a reckoning over racism in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.