Is the Catholic Church Racist for Taking So Long to Appoint Archbishop Gregory to the Cardinalate?

Archbishop Gregory will soon be Cardinal Gregory. I just saw a headline indicating that he will be the first African-American Cardinal in the US. This was a headline on CNN. Of course, they are trying to present this from a particular angle and people who know little about the Church may get the wrong impression from this headline.

Many will read the article thinking, wow, for the FIRST time in history, the Church is choosing an African American! That's crazy. But we need a little perspective.

First of all, there are currently 14 cardinals from the US, so we are not talking about very many men. Just 14. 

Secondly, the African American community is not very large within the Catholic Church. According to Pew Research, only 5% of black Americans are Catholic, while Catholics overall make up 22% of the overall population.

Next, there are very few black priests overall. Out of around 37,000 priests in the US, only 250 are black. With such a low number of black priests, we would not expect more than 1 black cardinal.

Let's check out the math on this. There are 14 cardinals in the US. One of them will be black, which represents 7% of cardinals. At the same time, 250 out of 37,000 priests are black which is 0.6% of the total priests. Just from a statistical point of view, if the percentage of black cardinals in the US exceeds 0.6%, they are represented more than the number of priests.

But how many cardinals have there EVER been? Overall in the history of the US, there have been 58 American Cardinals. Back to the math. If black priests are only 0.6% of priests, you would statistically expect 0.348 to be black. So having one black cardinal does not demonstrate racism or injustice.

We also need to keep in mind the universality of the Catholic Church. The Church is huge in Africa. We have many black cardinals when you take into consideration the entire world.

Some people are critical of some of the decisions of Archbishop Gregory. We cannot be made to feel we must accept everything he says and does because he is black and that doing so is some kind of racism. As a contrast to this, there are some black cardinals that many conservatives really appreciate and admire, such as Cardinal Sarah and Cardinal Arinze, to name just a couple.

The Catholic Church is universal and any form of racial discrimination is strongly frowned upon and in fact is a sin. God created all people of all different races. To reject someone based on their race is rejecting God's creation.