New Orleans African American Priest's Speech At Alternative Graduation at Notre Dame

This is an pretty incredible speech by African American Priest .Rev. John Raphael, SSJ . He is the Principal of the famous St Augustine Catholic High School (that has served the African American community forever) in New Orleans

The Speech and video is available at ND Response as well as the other speeches.

Here are some parts:

If indeed you are a minority on campus—and I know a little bit about being a minority on campus, it wasn’t all that bad!—You are not a minority in the rest of this great nation of ours! Recent scientific polls (Rasmussen and Gallup) tell us that 60% of American Catholics are with you, 52% of all Americans are withyou, and even 51% of Americans identify themselves as being PRO-LIFE! YOU ARE NOT ALONE!!!

Your witness has been conducted with dignity, with charity and with respect for all. Like all witnesses for truth, you have come under attack. You have been called names and your intentions have been impugned. Because of the historic dimensions of the election of the first African American president of the United States, and because you have rightly challenged the university’s decision to honor him, you have even been called racist!

What shall I say

…Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for such did they treat the prophets before you!

The truth is that you are anything but racist!

Racist is Planned Parenthood’s conscious targeting of African American and Latino communities for surgical and chemical extinction through abortion and contraception.Racist is the fact that 37% of abortions in the United States are performed on African American women and their babies, who comprise 13% of the American population.

Racist is the genocidal magnitude of the 447,000 African American babies whose precious lives are destroyed each year before they ever get a chance to see the light of day.

Racist and sexist is the presumption that a poor, unwed mother, with the right kind of support and assistance, does not have the capacity to love her baby enough to allow him to live—with her, or with another loving family—despite the circumstances of his conception............


Sadly this is not the first time an opportunity has been missed by Catholic leadership in the United States to stand for the oppressed and to speak truth to power. One hundred seventy years ago a Catholic Bishop, John England of Charleston, South Carolina setout to explain to America that an Apostolic Letter of Pope Gregory XVI condemned the international slave trade and said nothing about American slavery.

Bishop England was not a bad man; he was not in favor of slavery, nor was he was a racist. In fact, he exercised a cherished personal ministry to black Catholics in Charleston. He drew his arguments from scripture and from natural law, and he carefully parsed papal documents addressing slavery. But in the face of strong anti-Catholic sentiment and prejudice, he wanted to show his fellow ante-bellum southerners that Catholics could be just as American as everybody else, and that tolerance of their cherished institution, slavery, was not in any way opposed by the Catholic Church.

It was a lost opportunity for the Church in America to become a pioneer in the quest for racial equality, and many would later invoke his letters as expressions of a “Catholic” position on slavery. The slave was given the sacraments, but he continued to be denied his freedom.