Photo by Andrew Nelson

 ATLANTA—At Emory University’s Aquinas Day on Jan. 29, historian Matthew Cressler examined the understanding of faithfulness, as he explored what it means to be a “good” Catholic.  

Drawing on examples from the 1960s and today, Cressler highlighted a pattern in Catholic history where social justice movements are met with opposition from others sitting in the pews.  

As priests and religious sisters marched for voting rights in the 1960s, laypeople wrote angry letters to church leaders calling the display a disgrace to the Church. In 2020, as some bishops supported the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd, a priest called the activism misplaced, mocking the spiritual leaders as “masked thieves and bandits.”  

These tensions are not new. Amid the turmoil of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement unfolding, Trappist monk Father Thomas Merton shared a different vision of faithfulness. Merton wrote how “a true theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely compromise with them,” Cressler said.   

In his remarks, Cressler said it is hard to pigeonhole Catholic teachings as liberal or conservative on the American political spectrum. Servant of God Dorothy Day, a co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, is an example: she was a radical pacifist and strongly opposed abortion.   

“That’s where, of course, the notion of seamless garment of life eventually comes about,” he said, advocating for the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death.   

The Aquinas Center for Theology, a Catholic scholarly program at the Atlanta university, hosted its annual Aquinas Day, honoring its namesake St. Thomas Aquinas—the patron of students and scholars. The day featured a prayer service followed by a lecture, attended by more than 170 people, in person and online.  

Cressler is the author of “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.” He created “Bad Catholics, Good Trouble,” an educational web comic series profiling believers who fought for justice.  

Church history shows there are Catholics who see activism for justice as a “political” disruption rather than a spiritual necessity. Cressler said part of the reason for the clash is that for generations, Catholics were taught to be obedient, both to government and religious leaders. When religious leaders protested for political rights, they challenged what Catholics had been taught about their proper role.  

There are alternative examples of what it means to be a believer, beyond the displays of traditional devotional practices, who come from the “Catholic prophetic tradition” active in civil disobedience, he said.   

In Cressler’s web comic he featured a young University of Notre Dame graduate named Arthur who disrupted a televised Notre Dame football game in 1968 by marching onto the field in support of better campus conditions for Black students. South Carolina Judge Arthur McFarland would later become a national leader in the Knights of St. Peter Claver, a lay fraternal organization.   

Or the religious sister who got hit in the head by a brick thrown by a Chicago group whose members were “overwhelmingly white and Catholic” as she marched for housing rights with Martin Luther King Jr.   

Using the phrase used by the late Congressman John Lewis, he said Catholics can find “good trouble” at parish-based or secular organizations already engaged in justice work. He said the best approach is to “listen and ask, how can I be of service?”   

Cressler said he once hesitated to publicly claim his faith, fearing it would be seen as a political statement. But now Cressler said he’s “just being a lot more forthright about in public space, in ordinary interactions with ordinary folk, claiming my faith as what is motivating my work in the world.”