A sociologist of religion specializing in the Roman Catholic Church in the US said racism is keeping African-Americans out of the Catholic Church. The proportion of African-Americans in the Catholic Church is much lower than they are in the country in general.
“The numbers don’t add up,” Dr. Tia Pratt said. Pratt is a sociologist who specializes in the sociology of religion.
“As of last July, there are 43.8 million Blacks in the US which comes to 13.4 percent of the population,” Pratt, 2018-19 Scholar-in-Residence at the Aquinas Center in Philadelphia, said during a talk to 11 faculty and students. “There are 74.3 million self-identified Catholics in the US, which come to 22.8 percent of the population. The USCCB [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops] numbers tell us that there are 3 million Black Catholics in the US, which is approximately 1 percent of the US population being Black Catholics. The number don’t add up.”
On Thursday, Feb. 21 in the Grace Hall Multipurpose Room, Pratt gave a talk about how the numbers do not add up when talking about Black Catholics in the United States. The research that Pratt has done when examining systemic racism in the Catholic Church has resulted in her findings of the small number of African-American Catholics. It is also about how such racism continues to impact African-American Catholics’ experience through church closings and parish reorganization.
Pratt’s research for her books has focused on issues of identity among African-American Catholics, systemic racism in the US Catholic Churches and millennial generation Catholics.
“The traditional 45 minute masses are primarily early on Sunday morning or Saturday evenings but those masses are dominated by older folks,” Pratt said. “Older folks like to have what they are used to.”
Majority of the students that sat through the speech were there for a class but everyone was still intrigued by all the facts and research done. Even the faculty that joined the speech were shocked by some of the facts and evidence that were shown by Pratt. Since the speech rolled into the next class time, most people left before they could say how they enjoyed the speech and lunch.
“True Catholicity requires racial justice and so not paying lip service to those who have been in and continually be more individualized and its only then that we can break the chains of systemic racism and have Catholic institutions that truly embody their social justice teachings,” Pratt said.
Pratt is not done with her work just yet. She has reached out to Rome to try to get more documents to see if her theory is correct.
