No major Christian group in the U.S. has taken so strong and consistent a stand against racial discrimination as the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as the battle grows hotter, militant partisans of integration are troubled by signs that the Catholic position may be weakening. Speaking to the first National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice at Chicago's Loyola University last week, Chicago's Auxiliary Bishop Raymond P. Hillinger said flatly that those who fail to accept the church's stand for full racial equality "simply are not Catholic, and there are no two ways about it." But the 400 delegates found many a straw in the wind that seemed to be blowing the wrong way. Items:
¶ The Race Relations Bureau, which had existed for eleven years in the National Catholic Welfare Conference, was abolished as a separate department in 1955. Reason given: lack of funds.
¶ The Catholic Committee of the South, founded in 1939 to work on Southern social and economic problems, was quietly eliminated by the Southern bishops at the annual meeting of the Catholic hierarchy in 1956—so quietly that it is still listed in the 1958 National Catholic Almanac.
¶ The hard-hitting drive of New Orleans' Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel against racial segregation has petered out under pressure from laymen and private opposition from many of the clergy, and the desegregation that the archbishop planned for New Orleans parochial schools has been indefinitely postponed.
¶ Of five Catholic Interracial Centers called Friendship Houses that existed five years ago (in New York, Chicago, Washington, Portland, Ore. and Shreveport, La.), only two remain within the national organization—in Chicago and New York. Despite such signs of setback, the mood of the delegates was hopeful. "After all," said the Rt. Rev. Monsignor Hugh Dolan of St. Benedict's Church in Greensboro, N.C., whose parish is one of the few in the South with integrated parochial schools, "the Gospel principle of love is here to stay, and the segregationists can't do anything about it." The conference set up an interim committee (six priests, one nun and 15 laymen and women) to work toward a goal of 50 new Catholic interracial councils (present total: 36). Then the delegates wound up with a duplicating machine full of resolutions with some strong words among the platitudes. One resolution condemned fraternal organizations, e.g., the Knights of Columbus, which blackball Negroes, even in the North; another denounced as "scandalous" the "many Catholic hospitals [which] practice policies of racial exclusion or segregation." A third was directed at President Eisenhower's "go slow" words on school integration: "At this critical time in world history, the people of the United States have a right to expect their Chief Executive to use the full moral authority of his office to secure full equality for all citizens in all parts of our nation."