“We Are a Beautiful People”
Joanne Bray, International Liberation Reference Person for Catholics
I am the person in Co-Counseling who thinks about the Catholic peoples of the world. We are a beautiful people. We are Arab, Asian, African, Latina/o, Indigenous. We live in every country. One third of us live in Europe. Two thirds of us live in the global South. A tiny fraction of us (six percent) live in the United States.
We believe in God. We don’t believe in God. Some of us are angry with God. A lot of us need to do sessions on God. We are atheists and practicing Catholics. We have all sorts of relationships to the religion. And all of this is related to the early hurts we need to discharge. Also, I can’t do Catholic liberation work without talking about the impact of male domination, genocide, and slavery.
I continue to be inspired by three people: Dorothy Day was a U.S. Catholic woman who started the Catholic Workers’ Movement. She said, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” Mary Robinson is a former president of Ireland and a practicing Catholic. At a United Nations anti-racism conference at which Jews were under attack, she said, “I am a Jew.” Oscar Romero was the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador (El Salvador). His experience with imperialism led him to say, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”
Stamford, Connecticut, USA