One in Christ

In One in Christ Karen J. Johnson explores the efforts of African American and white Catholic laity in Chicago, sometimes with clergy support but often against clerical opposition, to challenge racism within and outside the Catholic Church. Johnson argues that the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, which “emphasized humanity's unity,” inspired and sustained Catholic interracial activists who “popularized the doctrine” and identified their efforts with it “several years before Pope Pius XII” endorsed mystical body of Christ theology in 1943 (p. 4). Catholic activists also “drew from the nineteenth-century tradition of Catholic social thought” (ibid.). Focusing on the 1930s through the mid-1960s, Johnson contends that Catholic activism, which included challenging racial discrimination in housing, was part of a long, broad civil rights movement that extended beyond the South. Like much of long civil rights movement historiography, her work draws attention to the contributions of women, contending that they “drove Catholic interracial activism forward” (p. 5). Although the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) increased Catholic activists' militancy by encouraging greater “lay participation in the Church” and ecumenical cooperation and Church involvement in the world's problems, “activists saw these reforms as affirmations of their decades-old emphases” that had often seen them work with Protestants and Jews but largely autonomously from, and sometimes at odds with, their prelates (ibid

Body of Christ · Doctrine · Economic Justice · Holy See · Humanity · Mysticism · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Theology · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

• “Racial Discrimination Can in No Way Be Justified”

  Open Access•Mark Newman•Journal of American Studies•2022

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