Bishop Hallinan's Pastoral Letter
Pastoral Letter (For First Sunday of Lent, February 19, 1961) [Transcription of page 1 and page 2]
My dear People:
In time of crisis, our people look to the Church to state moral principle and apply them to practical situations. With racial tension mounting, the Church must speak out clearly. In justice to our people, we cannot abandon leadership to the extremists whose only creed is fear and hatred.
This fear is unworthy, and in large measure unjustified. All peoples have a pride of race, a pride which they naturally desire to maintain and preserve. This pride is not destroyed, however, when people recognize the rights of others. It is the failure of many to understand this that causes fear.
The hatred is neither Christian nor American. If there is one virtue that marks the true follower of Christ, one virtue dearer to the heart of Our Divine Lord than any other, surely it is the virtue of charity. For He said: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another: that as I have loved you, you also love one another. By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Our Lord died upon the Cross to exemplify this love, not just for those who loved Him, but for those who hated Him -- for all men. This is the Christian way, and we cannot brush aside, or rationalize, or close our minds to this truth of our redemption.
We cannot ignore the teaching of the Sacred Scriptures, that in the beginning, God created man after His own image and likeness; that He breathed into him an immortal soul; that He gave him an eternal destiny. We cannot forget that all human beings, without regard to differences that are purely accidental, are created in the same way. We cannot ignore that Jesus Christ Our Lord, the Eternal Son of God, became man and died for all men, that they might be saved by his grace.
With these Christian truths in mind, the great Americans who wrote the Declaration of Independence set forth the fundamental principle of our government: “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The issue of racial justice is not new, nor is it only Southern. Only the urgency is new, and this is true in every part of the United States where racial discrimination is practiced. Twice in recent years, in 1943 and 1958, the Catholic Bishops of the United States have outline Christian position. In their annual letter in 1958, these two vital points were made:
(a) “It is unreasonable and injurious to the rights of others that a factor such as race, by and of itself, should be made a cause of discrimination…”
(b) “Legal segregation, or any form of compulsory segregation, in itself and by its very nature, imposes a stigma of inferiority upon the segregated people.”
All Catholic people in the United States are coming to realize, as the Bishops said, that “the time has come to cut through the maze of secondary or less essential issues, and to come to the heart of the problem. The heart of the race question is moral and religious. It concerns the rights of man and our attitude toward our fellow man.”
The influence of the Catholic Church in the South has not been based on great numbers, but upon great faith. When changing times have called for fresh application of the eternal God-given principles, our loyal people have not wavered. Nor will they waver now.
