How to Address Racism Within Your Own Congregation

Addressing racism within your own congregation means the slow work of naming and repairing racial contempt, colorism, and language hierarchy among the people you receive Communion with — not the racism you can denounce safely on the evening news, but the kind that gets whispered in the vestibule after the seven o’clock Mass. Around this parish we treat it as a branch of restorative conflict mediation and cultural memory work: the same circle that settles a dispute between two families at a velorio can hold this wound too, though this wound is older, and it runs through the Body of Christ itself. The United States bishops said it without decoration in Open Wide Our Hearts: racism is a sin, and the conversion it demands is ours, not somebody else’s. A parish that buries its dead along Whittier Boulevard and crowns its quinceañeras on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue cannot pretend the sin stops at the church door. What follows is how we take it on. Slowly. On the record.

Begin in the Confessional, Not on the Committee

I am the wrong man to start pointing fingers. I am the first penitent.

Years ago I saw a Black grandmother sitting at the back of the church before the Spanish Mass and asked her, kindly as I thought, which parish she was visiting from. She had been registered since before I was ordained. She had taught catechism for a decade. She was waiting for me to recognize her, and I did not, because somewhere in me a face and a pew did not match. That is how it starts. Not with a slur. With an assumption wearing a smile.

Racism survives in a parish mostly because the pastor is sure he has none. I was sure. I was wrong. So before you form a committee, take the question to prayer and to confession: Where have I sorted people? Whose name have I stopped trying to pronounce? Whose funeral did I hurry? The Penitential Act we pray every Sunday — what I have done, and what I have failed to do — is the Church’s own examination of conscience, and it will not be rushed.

The bishops’ pastoral letter Open Wide Our Hearts does not begin with programs. It begins with a conversion of heart, ours first. Pope Francis, in Fratelli Tutti, writes that contempt for whole groups of people corrodes a society long before anyone passes a law, and that repair begins when the other person recovers a face. Both documents are short enough for a Lenten small group. Both are hard enough for Lent.

Here is the tradeoff nobody advertises: if you preach this before you have confessed it, your people will hear politics. If you confess it first, they hear a pastor. Take the confessional before the pulpit. Every time.

Learn the Particular Sins of Your Own Pews

Racism in a nearly all-Latino parish does not arrive in the costume you see on television. On the east side it has four faces, and you need to know which ones live in your pews before you plan anything.

Anti-Blackness among ourselves

After a burial at Calvary, walking back to the cars, a longtime parishioner said of the deceased’s Black son-in-law, “At least the kids came out lighter.” He believed he was offering comfort. A grandmother on Pleasant Avenue was asked, by the woman arranging the coffee, when her people were going to find a church of their own. Both speakers would swear they are not racist. The slur is almost never the problem. The sorting is.

And the street keeps the receipts. Walk Evergreen Cemetery on Evergreen Avenue and you will find that for decades it kept a “colored section” for Black burials and a separate Chinese burial ground, because even the dead of this city were sorted. Boyle Heights itself stayed mixed — Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Black, Russian Molokan — partly because it escaped the racial covenants that locked so much of Los Angeles. The neighborhood never set out to be heroic. It just never built the wall. Our parishes inherited that openness, and with it the temptation to believe the wall was never there at all.

Contempt for our Indigenous members

We have families here who pray in Mam, K’iche’, and Q’anjob’al. A ministry leader once told two women from San Marcos to stop making that noise in the vestibule. The word indio is still used among us as a joke, the way a knife gets called a toy. Yet every December we kneel before Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared not to a bishop but to Juan Diego, an Indigenous man the empire had already decided was a nobody, and she spoke to him in Nahuatl: Am I not here, I who am your mother? The first document against our racism on this land was a mother’s voice in an Indigenous language. We keep her image in the church and the contempt in the vestibule. That has to be named plainly, because it is plain.

Colorism inside the quinceañera economy

Colorism is the sorting of our own children by shade. It decides who gets chosen for the courts and the coronaciones, who appears in the bulletin photographs, who is called güera as a compliment and prieta as a pity. I have heard a grandmother say over a newborn, pobrecita, salió morena como el papá, while everyone pretended it was tenderness. Add money and it sharpens: fee schedules for quinceañeras and weddings that quietly sort families by class, waived for some and enforced for others. Nobody calls any of this racism. They call it lo que queda bien. It is not about what looks right. It is about who counts as belonging.

Old wounds, new neighbors

During the pandemic I heard what was said about the Vietnamese family that runs the donut counter on First Street, and I did not say enough, soon enough. I hear the sneer some Mexican ministries use for the Guatemalan ministries sharing their hall. I watch the young couple who bought the two-story on Fickett stand at the back beside the family that has rented on that street for forty years, and I know both are waiting for the other to leave. A parish that cannot talk about any of this will not be graceful when it boils.

Use a Circle, Not a Scolding

The tool that works is the same restorative circle we use for tenant disputes and family fights over a curio cabinet: a talking piece, four questions, and the discipline to let people finish their sentences. A scolding from the pulpit takes ten minutes and fixes nothing for ten years. A circle takes months and can hold a wound for good.

The shape of a parish circle

• Open with a short prayer. A short one. The prayer is not the agenda.
• Use a talking piece — ours is a small wooden cross carved by a parishioner’s grandfather. Only the person holding it speaks.
• Four questions, in rounds: What happened? Who has been hurt? What do they need? Who owes the repair?
• Ground rules: speak from the “I,” no interrupting, what is said in the room stays in the room, one hour, then close with the Act of Contrition or the Memorare.
• Two facilitators. Never the pastor alone; his gravity bends every sentence.

Call in before you call out

In the moment, a script helps. Hermano, walk with me a second. Then plainly: What you said about the Okafors at the funeral — that was contempt, not a joke. It reached her. It reached me. I need you to go to her. Do not laugh along; laughter is permission. Do not correct a person in front of a crowd unless the harm is happening right now in front of that crowd — and then correct the harm, not the man. The private walk is where conversion has room to breathe.

Be honest about the cost. Some people will leave the circle before they are ready. Some will leave the parish. I have buried people who never made peace with each other, and I said the committal over that unfinished business like a stone over a seed. The circle does not promise a clean ending. It promises that nobody was thrown away in the process, and in the Gospel that is not a small thing.

Fix the Documents, Not Only the Hearts

Hearts change slower than paperwork. Change the paperwork anyway. In a parish, the paperwork is where belonging gets written down.

• Audit the parish council and the ministry heads. Who sits there? Who has never been asked?
• General Intercessions: one petition a month in Mam. Teach lectors to pronounce every name in the parish register; a butchered name is a small eviction.
• Liturgical calendar: celebrate — do not merely mention — St. Peter Claver on September 9, St. Martin de Porres on November 3, St. Kateri Tekakwitha on July 14, and Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12.
• Bulletin audit: whose children appear in the photographs, month after month.
• Money and mops: who counts the collection, who cleans the hall, and whether the cleaning crew is paid on time.
• Publish the quinceañera and wedding fee schedule, with one line in bold: No family is turned away. Speak to the pastor.

If you want help, ask for it. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles keeps an Office of Restorative Justice, and its people have walked into harder rooms than yours.

When the Harm Leaves the Pews

Sometimes contempt stays verbal. Sometimes it signs a lease.

A parishioner who owns a four-plex off Soto turns away a Black family holding a Section 8 voucher — unlawful in California, where source of income is protected. Another landlord will not rent to a Mam-speaking couple and calls it a preference. Now the sin has picked up paperwork, and paperwork can be fought. The Los Angeles County Civil + Human Rights Department takes discrimination complaints in housing, employment, and public accommodations; if you live inside the city limits, the City of Los Angeles runs its own civil rights office. Our accompaniment looks like the tenant work we already do here: sit with the family, keep the paper trail — the advertisement, the texts, the dates — walk them to the complaint, and pray with them before you do all three. When racism reaches a lease, it is a matter for the soul and for the county.

Measure the Parish by Its Burials

Every pastor knows the test, whether or not he admits it. Who gets the sung funeral with the full choir, and who gets the nine o’clock quick service with nobody in the pews? Whose wedding fills the church? Whose children lead the procession at First Communion? Follow a year of our funerals and you will find our love, with nothing left over.

I buried Mrs. Ruiz on a Tuesday and blessed her granddaughter’s quinceañera on the Saturday that followed, the same block, the same hands. That is the whole vocation in one week. If the parish’s tenderness keeps a ledger, it is kept at Evergreen and at Calvary, and if this city once sorted even its dead, the least a parish can do is bury everyone the same and write it down. Keep the anniversary book honest. When your parish publishes its history, the segregated sections go in it along with the fiestas. A parish that documents its own sins hands the next generation something better than a legend. It hands them a record.

A Year on the Parish Calendar

So the work stops depending on mood, lay it onto the liturgical year, where the Church already keeps her appointments.

• Epiphany. The old painters made one of the Magi a Black king. Keep him in the crèche and say his name from the ambo.
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Preach it. Do not let the raffle announcements push it out of the bulletin.
• February. One Sunday’s intercessions for Black Catholics, one hymn, one saint named from the ambo.
• Lent. A four-Thursday circle series, and an examination of conscience that includes contempt.
• The Easter Vigil. Check whose languages are in the readings.
• Pentecost. The feast of many tongues, which is the Church’s founding argument against one-language snobbery.
• September 9 and November 3. Peter Claver. Martin de Porres. Celebrate them.
• December 12. Guadalupe. Read the Nican Mopohua line in Nahuatl, then in Mam: a mother who spoke an Indigenous language to an Indigenous man when the empire said he was nobody.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our parish is almost entirely Latino. Can racism really be a problem here?

Yes. In a congregation like ours it shows up as anti-Blackness, colorism, contempt for Indigenous members, and a hierarchy of languages — Spanish over English over Mam, or the reverse, depending on who is speaking. The U.S. bishops called racism a sin and exempted no congregation. Test it against the record: who gets the sung funerals, who sits on the council, whose language is prayed aloud.

What do I do the moment someone says something racist at a ministry meeting?

Do not laugh. Laughter is permission. Say something brief and calm — we do not talk about our people that way — and keep the meeting moving. Then follow up privately and plainly, and bring the matter to a circle if the harm is ongoing. Correct a person in front of a crowd only when the harm is happening in front of that crowd.

Isn’t this political?

No. Open Wide Our Hearts calls racism a sin. Fratelli Tutti calls contempt a wound in the human family. Burying someone with dignity is not a platform, and the confessional is not a caucus. When a document of the Church says something plainly, a preacher is allowed to say it plainly too.

What if the pastor or the parish council refuses to act?

Start smaller than the council. One circle, two facilitators, whoever will come. Keep minutes. Pray for the man you are waiting on; he is being converted too, possibly at a slower rate than you would choose. And if the harm crosses into housing or employment, accompany the harmed family to the civil rights office whether or not the council ever votes.

How do we honor Indigenous members without turning them into a display?

Ask; do not appoint. Pay interpreters. Let them choose the reading, the hymn, the language, and the date. Tokenism happens when we schedule a people instead of listening to them. Listening takes longer and costs less.

Where This Column Goes Next

Next in this series I will print the full circle script — the rounds, the four questions, the closing prayer — as a one-page handout for parish teams, along with a short glossary of the plain terms used here: anti-Blackness, colorism, calling in. And I am asking for your help with the parish-records column. Send me the memory your parish keeps quietly. The first Black family registered. The Chinese section at Evergreen. The Mam Mass that was promised and never happened. We document because the street already does, and the street does not lie.

Pray for us. We are slower than the Gospel and faster than we deserve.

— Father Tomás Guerrero