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Black Catholics celebrate Juneteenth, reckon with church’s history of slavery
The Washington Post ^ | June 19, 2023 | Mary Claire Malloy

Posted on 06/19/2023 4:01:27 PM PDT by ebb tide

Black Catholics celebrate Juneteenth, reckon with church’s history of slavery

“Dearest brothers and sisters in Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” Cardinal Wilton Gregory said from the altar at Mount Calvary Catholic Church Sunday morning. “Surely that scriptural quotation must’ve captured the emotions of those formerly enslaved people in Texas as the words of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War finally had reached them.”

Sunday’s Mass in Forestville, celebrated by America’s first Black cardinal, is part of a nationwide commemoration of Juneteenth. President Biden first designated the day as a federal holiday in 2021, a year after protests over George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis. Also called Jubilee Day and Black Independence Day, June 19 commemorates the end of slavery in Texas, heralded by the arrival in Galveston of Union troops who finally enforced the Emancipation Proclamation issued two and a half years prior that granted freedom to the state’s 250,000 enslaved people. A Juneteenth banner at Mount Calvary crosses out the words “July 4th” with a red X. “1865,” it reads. “Because my ancestors weren’t free in 1776.”

After the choir sang a chorus of Hallelujahs, Gregory, wearing vestments with kente cloth, began his homily. He warned that not everyone in the country wanted the message of Juneteenth to be delivered in 1865 — or today. That sentiment is familiar to Black Catholics reckoning with racial injustices, including the sins of their own church.

“Racism is not hidden anymore,” said Deacon Keith Somerville, 57, who has been at Mount Calvary for about a year. “I hope and pray that we as a nation will learn that it doesn’t matter what color we are. We are all under one God.”

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Catholic; Current Events; Religion & Culture; Worship
KEYWORDS: bigot; blm; donateforjim; frankencardinal; gregory; maryclairemalloy; racist
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1 posted on 06/19/2023 4:01:27 PM PDT by ebb tide
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To: ebb tide

Why don’t blacks reckon with Africans that rounded up and sold their people into slavery?


2 posted on 06/19/2023 4:04:59 PM PDT by ConservativeInPA (Delay Trump’s trial, delay. Elect Trump President. Trump pardons himself.)
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To: ConservativeInPA
Why don’t blacks reckon with Africans that rounded up and sold their people into slavery?

Who has the money?

3 posted on 06/19/2023 4:06:05 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: All

Only blacks were slaves ?


4 posted on 06/19/2023 4:06:13 PM PDT by escapefromboston (Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.)
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To: ebb tide

HISTORY: Not all slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, nor via Juneteenth. Only the slaves of the REBEL states were freed then. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime effort to split and weaken the South; he did NOT free any slaves in the Northern states. Slaves in the non-rebelling border states had to wait for the 13th Amendment, effective December 18, 1865.


5 posted on 06/19/2023 4:07:25 PM PDT by 2harddrive (https://rumble.com/vdptuf-best-election-fraud-video-ever-unmasked-have-we-uncovered-the-truth-about)
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To: ebb tide

Washington post can’t help themselves.


6 posted on 06/19/2023 4:08:28 PM PDT by Bayard
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7 posted on 06/19/2023 4:08:44 PM PDT by ebb tide (The pope ... said the church's “catechesis on sex is still in diapers.”)
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To: ebb tide

The African Cardinals have no time for that nonsense.


8 posted on 06/19/2023 4:09:24 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: ebb tide

I guarantee this young liberal woke writer had no idea what Juneteenth was until it was declared a holiday.


9 posted on 06/19/2023 4:12:07 PM PDT by KC_Conspirator
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To: KC_Conspirator
I guarantee this young liberal woke writer had no idea what Juneteenth was until it was declared a holiday.

Until the media pointed out that Trump scheduled a rally on it.

10 posted on 06/19/2023 4:12:51 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: All

What they should REALLY “reckon with” is why so many of the people that they are celebrating with want to shoot them.


11 posted on 06/19/2023 4:21:40 PM PDT by LegendHasIt
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To: ConservativeInPA
Why don’t blacks reckon with Africans that rounded up and sold their people into slavery?

Shame.

Most blacks have so little to be proud of. So they fantasize they are descendant of kings and queens and the great pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

Take that away from them -- tell them their own kings and queens sold them to whitey -- that whitey treated them better than their own kings and queens -- and what do they have left?

12 posted on 06/19/2023 4:22:09 PM PDT by Angelino97
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To: ConservativeInPA

Yes. Arabs didn’t give it up even though Western nations did.

Note “the 1960s” here and “20th Century”....
The Arab slave trade was conducted through slave markets in the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Most of the slaves were from Africa’s interior. Historians estimate that between 650 AD and the 1960s, 10 million to 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders.
Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia’s 9.85 million is not far behind the conservative estimate of nearly 12 million African victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Some African historians, though, reject these figures on the grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Africans were shipped out during the Atlantic trade alone.

According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. “This trade also, with the notable exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of 18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims,” adds Duncan Clarke.

Through out the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans.

From: New African, March 27, 2018 article:
Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs.


13 posted on 06/19/2023 4:24:38 PM PDT by frank ballenger (You have summoned up a thundercloud. You're gonna hear from me. Anthem by Leonard Cohen)
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To: 2harddrive

WAPO hates the Catholic Church, so they are trying to sow division here.


14 posted on 06/19/2023 4:28:01 PM PDT by mfish13 (Elections have Consequences.)
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To: ConservativeInPA

Why don’t they look at the alternative, they could have been stuck as Africans in Africa. Host of the third world.

On top of that, they could have been trapped in one of the dozen nations in Africa where Islam openly practices slavery.

Also seeing they’re in church discussing slavery reparations, they could have started with first on deck: Moses and his people.


15 posted on 06/19/2023 4:29:48 PM PDT by himno hero (had'nff)
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To: ebb tide

White Catholics? Never heard of such a term. Just Catholics, and their country of origin maybe.


16 posted on 06/19/2023 4:29:57 PM PDT by If You Want It Fixed - Fix It ( )
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To: ebb tide

A picture was put up showing this little Japanese girl saying she wasn’t responsible for Pearl Harbor and a little American girl saying she wasn’t responsible for Hiroshima/Nagasaki since all that happened 80 years ago or so; but yet, we have the media and African-Americans still screaming about slavery that ended 150 years ago.


17 posted on 06/19/2023 4:31:18 PM PDT by SkyDancer (My Talents Are So Hidden That Even I Can't Find Them ...)
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To: SkyDancer

As long as there is money to be made by doing it, it will continue.


18 posted on 06/19/2023 4:32:38 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: ebb tide

Oh, do they mean the history like when the Church was the only human institution on the planet to condemn slavery in the 16th century? That history?


19 posted on 06/19/2023 4:33:54 PM PDT by Antoninus (Republicans are all honorable men.)
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To: ebb tide

What’re the odds we ever see an article title something along the lines of “Black democrats celebrate Juneteenth, reckon with their party’s history of slavery and Jim Crow laws” ?


20 posted on 06/19/2023 4:47:31 PM PDT by verum ago (I figure some people must truly be in love, for only love can be so blind.)
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