By Dr. Anna L. Peterson, University of Florida — The Conversation US — 15 June 2020
Two days after the Catholic bishop of El Paso, Mark Seitz, knelt with a dozen other priests in a silent prayer for George Floyd — holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign — he received a phone call from Pope Francis thanking him. Earlier, the pope had posted a message to Americans saying “we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.”
These actions reflect a distinctive commitment to social justice that has entered the Catholic mainstream over the past 50 years. The Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965 sided firmly with social justice, asserting that the only way to achieve lasting peace was to address the sources of unrest. As Pope Paul VI stated in 1972: “If you want peace, work for justice.”
Liberation theology, a Catholic movement emerging from Latin America at the same time, sees violence not as an individual flaw but as a feature of unjust social or political structures. Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated in 1980 and canonized as a Catholic saint in 2018, insisted the church must side with the victims of institutionalized violence — a principle known as the “preferential option for the poor.”
Bishop Seitz cited theologian James Cone in explaining his protest: “In America, the Word comes tortured, black and lynched.” He declared: “To say that black lives matter is just another way of repeating something we in the United States seem to so often forget — that God has a special love for the forgotten and oppressed.”