white Catholics and threats of a lawsuit. Ritter responded with the threat of excommunication and the protests eventually died down. The public schools integrated later, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Cardinal Ritter College Prep and Cardinal Ritter Senior Services in St. Louis are named for the trailblazing church leader. The more the white and black parish groups talked, the more they realized they had had vastly different experiences of growing up Catholic. They later surveyed fellow parishioners for their remembered experience and drew the same conclusion. The result was a theater production, “Growing Up Catholic: What’s Race Got to Do With It?” an amalgam of their research into growing up in St. Louis from the black and white perspective. The “reader’s theater” production, which involved no props, costumes or memorized lines, just the characters’ spoken word, was performed by individual parishioners and professional actors last October at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. They are looking for ways to share it with other audiences. The production centers on conversations among women reminiscing about their school days and of girls attending an all-girls high school. In one scene, a black girl who has won a scholarship to a prestigious university is advised by her counselor not to aim so high. The same counselor advises a white girl with mediocre grades to apply to college when she’d rather get a job in retail.
A College Church volunteer helps a client obtain legal documents.
In another scene, students at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration sing songs praising the Irish and other “white” nationalities. But when they sing disparaging words about blacks, the teacher does nothing to stop them. The scene was based on one parishioner’s experience. “As Catholics, we care about a lot of the same things,” Jordan said. “But it’s the cultural experiences that make us different. People didn’t realize the amount of injustices that occurred.” College Church parishioner Jo Curran remembered thinking that as upset as she was about Michael Brown’s death and the ensuing racial fallout, she didn’t consider herself as someone who reaped the benefits of “white privilege.” “I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. How am I possibly living in white privilege?” she remembers thinking at the time. “But friends helped me understand that I was privileged. I lived differently than African Americans. I came to get it. It was shocking to me how we lived our daily lives so differently.” The Jesuit-founded and inspired College Church is a “destination parish” that draws less from its immediate neighborhoods than from Catholics with a social justice bent from throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. It is recognized for its spirituality and programs around social justice. Among other things, the parish provides clothing and food – and overnight housing on some cold nights – to homeless people. But the cornerstone of the College Church’s advocacy for the disenfranchised is its document assistance program. Trained volunteers work with homeless or transient people, including people out of prison, to overcome the obstacles to obtaining a state photo ID. They will need one in order to access education, housing, and increasingly, the ballot box. One barrier is the cost of such documents, ranging from $10 to $34 depending on the state. But other challenges are posed by legal name changes, or even, in some cases, no name given on a birth certificate. The program, which started in the 1990s, is said to be the only large-scale one of its kind in Missouri. “Social justice is a really big deal at College Church,” said Curran, who joined because her neighborhood parish wasn’t providing the spiritual sustenance she was seeking. “I was searching,” she said. Before finding a spiritual home at College Church, she said, “I didn’t know if I would die a Catholic.” WINTER 2017
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