In Case No One Told You, Racism is a Sin

Once in awhile, I see something that drives home for me how hateful our culture has become.

I’m not on Twitter/X nearly as often as I used to be, things being what they are. If you want to see the 280-character-or-less snark I’ve become infamous for, you should join me on Bluesky. But I do check in to Xitter every day or so to see what’s going on. And what I saw this week made me ill.

In a video that’s gone viral, a white Catholic man was explaining that he’d refused to receive Holy Communion from an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion, because the woman was Indian. His reason for this was “for fear that I might get fecal matter on my Eucharist receiving from an Indian woman. Plus I’m not gonna receive it from anyone who’s non-white.” He skirted around the pews to receive the Body of Christ from his white pastor instead. He mentioned that he’d probably go to confession about this later, but that he was going to keep doing it. The video had millions of views. Thankfully, many of my fellow Catholics were screaming at him in the comments, but no words seemed strong enough.

A myriad of angry responses went through my mind in quick succession.

One of the first thoughts that came to mind, as a chronically ill person, was all the doctors, nurses and phlebotomists who’ve taken care of me who came from India. If I was going to make up a stereotype about Indian people, it certainly wouldn’t be that they have feces on their hands; it would be that they must all be good at biology class. But that’s really beside the point.

The next was, of course, my Baltimore catechism. Of course, you can’t confess a sin INTENDING to do it again. That’s not a real confession, it’s a sacrilege.

I also thought about the time I took the children at the after school geography club on a virtual tour of India: the way the children were delighted to see Hindu Indian children throwing dye at each other on Holi and Syro-Malabar Indian people carrying icons of Jesus and Mary on the backs of elephants. They were awed when I told them that Indian Christianity was founded thousands of years ago by the apostle Thomas, so there were Indians worshipping Jesus for far, far longer than there have been American Christians. We ate delicious snacks from the Indian grocery store while we watched a video of Indian people tasting American snacks, for a sort of cultural exchange. I put on a video of Indian people performing traditional dances, and the children laughed and danced along. I was not only angry at this man, I was sad for him. White supremacists miss out on learning so many fun and fascinating things.

And then I went back to being angry.

When I say that our culture has decided that hate and bigotry are fashionable, this is what I’m talking about. People feel emboldened to boast about such offensive behavior. And while most white American Catholics aren’t nearly so bold as to post videos bragging about this, but from what I’ve seen and the way they talk to other white Catholics, a lot of them are privately equally racist.

For the record, in case there was any doubt, racism is a sin.

It may not be one of those sins you hear sermons about here in America very often, but it’s a sin.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:  Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an equal dignity. The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it: Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.

Eradicated. Not kept to yourself because nice people don’t say it out loud: eradicated, as incompatible with God’s design. This is a serious matter.

I promise you, at the end of your life, you will be graded on how you treat your neighbor. And we’re Christians, so the answer to “who is my neighbor” is “everyone, especially those who need your help and those people society wants you to despise.” People of different races and from different countries than you are always your neighbor, and more so in times like these where bigotry is fashionable.

This is far, far more important for your immortal soul than debates about, say, whether you should receive Holy Communion on the tongue or the hand.  It’s immensely more important than whether your church uses a pipe organ or guitars. God cares infinitely more about it than about debates concerning how many fish sticks you get at your one meal on Good Friday and whether you have Jell-o with them. When you stand before the throne of God, I don’t think he’s going to mention that time you wore a mantilla on you head, or whether you genuflected or just did that little half-curtsey without touching your knee on the ground when you went into your pew at church. But he will definitely mention how you treated your neighbor. Because your neighbor is Christ for you.

Your neighbor is Christ for you, in a different way but every bit as importantly as the Eucharist is Christ for you.

That’s not an optional part of Catholicism. You can’t have the smells and bells and sacraments but skip the part where you love your neighbor– or rather, you can and many do, but they are in sin. It would be sacrilege to desecrate the Eucharist, and it’s another kind of sacrilege to be bigoted against your neighbor. We’re supposed to respond to Christ everywhere we meet Him. Your neighbor, male or female, black or white or any of the myriad shades of brown, from any continent, from any culture, is an icon of Jesus, and that demands a response from you.

That man may have swallowed the Host in Mass, when he went around the pews to receive it from a white priest. But he rejected receiving Jesus all the same.

Please, do what you can to change the Church in America. Racism is evil, and we have to fight it for Jesus’s sake.