Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manilla died monday. Sin led the overthrow of not one, but two corrupt and oppressive governments. Sin was one of the leaders of the church in the 1980s, along with Cardinal Józef Glemp and Archbishop Oscar Romero, who defied orders to stay out of politics and use the weight of his office on behalf of the people. The gospel says this:

“But those, who for love of me, uproot themselves and accompany the people and go with the poor in their suffering and become incarnated and feel as their own the pain, the abuse – they will secure their lives, because my Father will reward them.”

The easy thing to do, especially when you have a high office, is to make and keep friendships with the powerful. The hard thing to do is to work for the people that feel beat down.

This gets back to the thesis I often get back to: that too many people use their religion as a way to confirm prejudices that they already have and justify whatever way they are living. I thought of this as they announced the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen yesterday. Killen was acquitted years ago because, in the words of one juror, he was a preacher. A preacher who apparently saw his role as helping the powerful opress people.

I’m willing to cut the jury a break for their reluctance to convict for manslaughter. I’ve been on a jury for a murder case. It’s hard for people who haven’t been on a jury to understand the trememendous weight you feel in that room. I can see them being reluctant to convict an 80 year-old man of murder, so they bumped it down to a lesser included offense.

When Killen’s attorney heard that the jury was split 6-6, I think he thought that it was six to acquit. The South has changed an awful lot.

Unfortunately, not enough. I guess that there are still enough people that don’t get it that it is actually politically risky to acknowledge what used to happen. For example, Sen. Mary Landrieu (who, in my perfect political world, would be a presidential candidate…) introduced a resolution last week to acknowledge that the senate was wrong to block anti-lynching legislation. Landrieu managed to get herself and 88 co-sponsors for this bill. Notable are the absences from the list. Sen. Jon Kyl of our state, couldn’t see fit to sign on (Sen. John McCain did). Neither Senator from Mississippi, the state where Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were murdered, signed on. So, those appologies to the black community a while back were hollow after all, eh Sen. Lott?

What amazes me about this is that this is merely a resolution, a piece of paper, just words. There is absolutely no policy impact of this. This should have been an easy thing to do. But, I guess Lott, Kyl and company are worried that the guys in the white sheets will stay home on election day if they acknowledge that sitting by while citizens were murdered for the color of their skin was a bad thing.

(NB - In doing some research for this post (yeah, I actually do some…) I found two blogs, Catholicism, Holiness and Spirituality, and Bad Catholic. I haven’t decided whether to add these to the blog roll, but check them out.)