At the memorial service on the eve of Inauguration Day for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from COVID-19, it was symbolic and fitting that a prayer was offered by Cardinal Wilton Gregory. It was a reminder that the other half of the presidential ticket made history in 2020.
While Kamala Harris’ groundbreaking vice presidency has garnered most of the attention, Joseph R. Biden Jr. also is only the second Roman Catholic president of the United States, with John F. Kennedy’s ascension as the first coming 60 years ago.
Gregory’s words that night provided comfort to a mourning nation: “Our sorrow unites us to one another as a single people with compassionate hearts. May our prayer strengthen our awareness of our common humanity and our national unity at a time when harmony is a balm that seeks to comfort and strengthen us as a single people facing a common threat that is no respecter of age, race, culture, or gender.”
But his brief address that night emphasizing “common humanity” and “national unity” did not mention something Gregory himself acknowledged in an interview with Religion News Service, a subject the first African American to hold that rank in the Roman Catholic Church was well-equipped to voice: “The Catholic Church exists within society. … It is supposed to be a source of renewal, conversion. But we are Catholics who live in the American environment, and therefore we share some of the very same problems that the wider society does: racism, inequality, a lack of opportunity.”
It was a divide that I’ve felt throughout my life, as a cradle Catholic with 16 years of Catholic education under my belt. I spent my elementary years in an all-Black school taught by an order of nuns founded in Baltimore by a Black woman and a French priest in 1829 to educate Black children, and high school and college at predominantly white Catholic institutions, never far from reminders of my race and my place in the church. My experiences, good and bad, loomed as large and real as the sacraments.
