Editor’s Note: In a speech given to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, Spain on November 4, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, who is also the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, characterized social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, as anti-Christian, Marxist-inspired pseudo-religions. He went on to suggest that such movements are replacing the Church and levies other criticisms of current campaigns for social justice. His comments follow recent comments by Pope Francis to the Fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements in mid-October, which included the pope saying, “Do you know what comes to mind now when… I think of the Good Samaritan? …The protests over George Floyd … This movement did not pass by on the other side of the road when it saw the injury to human dignity caused by an abuse of power.”
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by Brian Fraga
National Catholic Reporter
Fr. Bryan Massingale, a leading Catholic theologian in the U.S., says he read Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez’s Nov. 4 speech to a Catholic group in Spain with “dismay and disbelief.”
Gomez, who is also the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, claimed that some modern social justice movements were Marxist-inspired, anti-Christian “pseudo-religions.”
“He has a serious misunderstanding, and perhaps even a willed ignorance, about the goals and motivations of contemporary social justice movements,” said Massingale, a Fordham University theologian and author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.
Massingale and other Black Catholics told NCR that they were appalled at how Gomez framed today’s social justice activism, including the anti-racist movement in the United States, as an angry expression of a corrosive secularism being pushed by an “elite leadership class.”
“For example, he blanketly characterizes social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter as pseudo-religions based on profoundly atheistic ideologies that are hostile to Catholic belief,” Massingale said…