Counter-Currents
Flannery O’Connor & Racism, Part 1
The Cancellation of Flannery O’Connor
Greg Johnson
3,352 words 
In 2020, the anti-racists came for Flannery O’Connor. Paul Elie led the charge in an article for The New Yorker, the online version of which was entitled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”[1] Elie’s answer was: pretty racist.
Elie had been seething about this issue for years. In his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which discusses O’Connor alongside Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, he writes:
Yet at the same time there is the word “nigger” running through the correspondence. There are the quips about blacks, offered again and again, as punch lines. There is, in the letters, a habit of bigotry that grows more pronounced as O’Connor’s fiction, in matters of race, grows more complex and profound—a habit that seems to defy the pattern established by her art.[2]
Elie’s New Yorker article seems to have been triggered by a response to this passage in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, an apologetic work by an O’Connor scholar.[3]
Once Elie threw down the gauntlet, students at Loyola College in Baltimore petitioned to have Flannery O’Connor Hall renamed. The administration agreed, claiming that naming a dormitory after a racist was inconsistent with their “Jesuit values.” The whole affair took on the air of an exorcism when it was announced that, henceforth, the building would be named Thea Bowman Hall, in honor of the first black member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. (As far as I know, nobody asked if Sister Thea had any negative attitudes toward white people. But if she did, presumably that would have served them right.)
It was only a matter of time before O’Connor was canceled, for O’Connor had views of blacks that can be described as racist by any reasonable definition, and reasonable definitions have been discarded long ago.
For my purposes, I will define racism as a preference for people of one’s own racial group over members of other racial groups, when all other factors are equal. The proviso “all other factors being equal” is important because it isolates race alone as the basis for one’s preference. This preference need not be connected with attitudes of superiority or inferiority, friendship or enmity.
Of course, when radically different peoples live at close quarters, invidious comparisons and enmity tend to emerge. This is clearly true in O’Connor’s case. Based on her extensive experience with blacks, she thought they were inferior to whites in important ways and frankly disliked dealing with them. Furthermore, O’Connor was deeply hostile to liberal anti-racists, whom she thought both ignorant and arrogant.
But, like Martin Heidegger, Flannery O’Connor is really too big to cancel. O’Connor is a much-loved writer. Her fans often refer to her as just “Flannery.” Her hometown of Savannah celebrates her birthday with a parade, in which people dress up like their favorite O’Connor characters. Some women (and I am sure a few drag queens) even dress like Flannery herself, with her cat’s-eye glasses and cranked up hair. Her family farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, is a museum, but in truth it is more of a pilgrimage site. In 2015, US Postal Service issued a stamp with Flannery’s portrait.
Flannery in uncancelled glory.
O’Connor is also well-ensconced in academia, where her books and stories are widely read and a growing number of scholars specialize in her work. The Flannery O’Connor Review is an academic journal dedicated to her work. Fordham University Press publishes a series called Studies in the Catholic Imagination supported by the Flannery O’Connor Trust. There is even a Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at her alma mater, Georgia College and State University, in Milledgeville.
Thus many O’Connor fans and scholars have rushed to her defense. All of them, of course, believe that white racism is deplorable, maybe even a sin. They wish to absolve O’Connor of the charge. But they really can’t.
O’Connor’s friends and family anticipated the charges of racism long ago. The pattern was set by O’Connor’s close friend Sally Fitzgerald, who edited the first collection of O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being, and her Library of America Collected Works volume.[4] Fitzgerald acknowledged what was already known but omitted much that was inflammatory.
Like Heidegger’s family, O’Connor’s family delayed the release of more controversial material, and then only dribbled it out slowly. This allowed scholars and the culture at large to invest deeply in both thinkers, cushioning the blow of their more controversial ideas and creating a strong incentive to apologetics rather than denunciations.
Like O’Connor’s defenders, I have a deep love of Flannery. I take it personally when she is attacked. Thus my first instinct is to fly to her defense against the “woke” lynch mobs. But Paul Elie is right. O’Connor really was racist. However, unlike both her attackers and defenders, I don’t think that O’Connor was factually incorrect, much less sinful, to be racist. Quite the contrary. I believe that Flannery O’Connor was an unusually clear-sighted and honest observer of the race problem in America, a problem that has only grown more bitter and intractable in the more than 60 years since her death.
To be precise, I think that in substance O’Connor’s views on race are defensible. But I will concede that her frequent use of “nigger” and other forms of “white trash” vernacular is tasteless and offensive. Indeed, it is meant to be offensive. But such offense is a needless impediment to taking her views seriously.
The Evidence
Let’s look at some of O’Connor’s most “problematic” statements about blacks.
According to Elie, in 1943, O’Connor took a trip North:
[The] letters and postcards [O’Connor] sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.[5]
One of Flannery’s dearest friends was Maryat Lee (1923–1989), a playwright and theater director with Left-liberal views on race. Flannery, however, was quite frank and provocative in her disagreements. For instance, one of Flannery’s letters to Maryat begins “Dear Nigger Loving New York White Woman” and is signed “Yours Neutral to Niggers.”[6] O’Connor’s salutation, of course, is in the language of non-genteel Southern segregationists. She herself didn’t talk that way, but she found it worth quoting.
O’Connor was, moreover, not exactly candid in claiming that she was “neutral” on the topic of “niggers.” Indeed, according to Elie, in an unpublished letter to Lee dated May 3, 1964, O’Connor writes: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” As we will see, the “new kind” of blacks are the self-assertive, emancipated, integrated kind, like James Baldwin.
In a letter to Lee from April 25, 1959, O’Connor rejects the suggestion that she meet with fiction writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924–1987) in Georgia:
No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.[7]
In this case, the tradition she is observing is segregation.
In a letter to Lee from May 21, 1964, O’Connor returns to the topic of Baldwin. He is the new kind of black she doesn’t like. She thinks somewhat more of Martin Luther King, Jr. But she much prefers boxer Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), a more old-fashioned black who justified segregation.
About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I dont [sic] think is the ages [sic] great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont [sic] mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.[8]
Near the end of her life, O’Connor spent nearly a month in the hospital in Atlanta. When she and her mother returned to Milledgeville, they found that the local black “help” had done nothing during their absence:
You asked what was done when we came back. Nothing. We left in a hurry without washing the tops of the breakfast pans or the coffee pot and everything was exactly like we left it. Rip Van Winkle didn’t have it any different. Not even a glass of ice water to hand. Dust everywhere. The refrigerator full of rotten food. And Louise bowing & scraping and carrying on about how much she had missed us. Regina had told her hurriedly to take care of everything but nothing specific. Anyway even if she had it wouldn’t have done any good. They had a months’ vacation with pay. I sho am sick of niggers.[9]
The last sentence was omitted by editor Sally Fitzgerald but is quoted by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.[10] O’Connor is consciously adopting “white trash” vernacular. Yet she does so because it expresses her feelings. If there is any “irony” here, it is “How ironic that white trash are right about blacks.” This implies that O’Connor does not necessarily dismiss the attitudes toward blacks that she puts in the mouths of her poor white characters.
These quotes indicate that O’Connor’s views on blacks were complicated, perhaps even contradictory, and surely evolved over time. For instance, in one place she says she is an integrationist on principle. Yet elsewhere she approvingly cites Cassius Clay’s remarks that support segregation. Her claim to be “neutral” is also contradicted by her statement that she doesn’t like blacks.
I believe, however, that such apparent contradictions can be resolved. If O’Connor were put on the witness stand and forced to speak straightforwardly, without irony or playfulness, I think she would maintain four basic theses about blacks. First, she believed the best solution to the race problem in America is to ship the blacks back to Africa. Second, as is clear from her correspondence, O’Connor believed blacks to be inferior to whites in important ways. Third, since she thought that repatriating blacks is politically impossible, she hoped that blacks and whites would just have to muddle through together somehow. Fourth, she believed that liberal attitudes about race relations were based on false premises and can only lead to disaster.
O’Connor Wanted to Ship Blacks Back to Africa
Flannery O’Connor’s most radical statement on race has not yet been published. O’Connor scholar Ralph C. Wood paraphrases an unpublished letter to Maryat Lee held by Georgia College and State University. In this letter, O’Connor claimed that her preferred solution to America’s race problem was to send the “niggers” back to Africa.[11] O’Connor claimed that only “the Lord” prevented her from making this view public. Wood probably paraphrased this letter because the O’Connor estate did not give him permission to quote it.
What did O’Connor mean? Why did O’Connor believe it? And why did she not make it public?
First, if O’Connor wanted to completely remove blacks from America and return them to Africa, then she clearly did not believe that racial segregation was a bad thing or that increased racial integration was a good thing. She might have had objections to particular features of segregation as it was practiced in the South. But, in principle, O’Connor was the most radical segregationist possible. You can’t get more segregated than separate continents.
Second, we don’t really know why O’Connor held this view. Perhaps the full release of her correspondence will reveal her reasons. In the meantime, we are entitled to speculate a bit based on the reasons offered by other back-to-Africa advocates, for the idea was not novel. Indeed, it is almost as old as the United States itself and was supported by both whites and blacks. For instance, in 1815, a wealthy black American named Paul Cuffe began shipping free blacks to Liberia. In 1816, a white man, Robert Finley, founded the American Colonization Society. Between the two World Wars, black nationalist Marcus Garvey and Mississippi segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo promoted back-to-Africa proposals. During the civil rights turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s, the back-to-Africa idea enjoyed renewed popularity and was embraced by such disparate groups as Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.
The back-to-Africa movement wasn’t all about “hate” for black people. Obviously, the blacks who promoted back to Africa did not hate black people, although some of them surely hated whites.
What united the back to Africa movement is the belief that blacks and whites were just too different to live together on equal terms in America. As we will see, O’Connor clearly believed that whites and blacks are very different. If she believed in “back to Africa,” then surely she believed those differences were deep enough to make a multiracial polity impossible or undesirable.
Third, why did O’Connor fear making this view public? Again, until her full correspondence is released, we are forced to speculate. She believed that “the Lord” was protecting her. But from whom? Basically, the two options are: from the wrath of God or the wrath of her fellow men.
Did O’Connor believe that God commanded blacks and whites to live together in a multiracial society? Many Christians today fervently believe this, including many of O’Connor’s defenders. O’Connor was a good Catholic, but good Catholics don’t necessarily believe in racial equality and integration.
As a Catholic, O’Connor believed that all men are equal in the eyes of God. But does that mean that Christians should ignore the inequalities that they see with their own eyes? O’Connor clearly wasn’t willing to close her eyes to racial differences.
O’Connor also believed that the Church is a potentially universal spiritual community. But does that mean that there should be a universal political community as well? For instance, are Christians obligated to embrace one-world government? If there are differences that make it difficult for two peoples to share the same polity—for instance, the English and the Irish—are Christians obligated to ignore those differences and force the two peoples together? There’s no evidence that O’Connor believed such things.
But what if keeping blacks and whites separate is unjust? If segregation is unjust, shouldn’t Christians oppose it? I am sure that O’Connor would agree with that. But I don’t believe that she thought that segregation was necessarily unjust. Yes, when blacks and whites interacted in the South, there were constant occasions for misunderstanding, conflict, ugliness, and injustice. But such perilous interactions don’t result from the races being apart. They result from them being together. They are not products of segregation. They are products of integration. And the integrationist agenda was to increase the number and intimacy of these interactions, which could only increase trouble. The ugliness and injustice would end, however, if the races were completely separate.
Many Christians today believe that national and racial differences are somehow an offense to God, as if God can’t cross state lines. But how does that make sense? Presumably God himself creates human differences. So how can they stand in God’s way? Can God tie a knot that he can’t untie?
Thomas Aquinas did not think that natural or conventional differences are impediments to divine grace. In the Questions on Charity in the Summa Theologica (Secunda Secundae, Questions 23–46), Aquinas grants that some inequalities are entirely natural, such as certain social hierarchies and our preferences for friends and family over strangers or fellow countrymen over foreigners. Yet Aquinas makes clear that such inequalities do not impede divine love. Nor are they erased by it. In fact, they act as channels through which divine loves flows. Thus there is no contradiction between being Christian and love of one’s own: one’s own family, one’s own people, or one’s own race. Loving your own is divine love working through you.
This is even true of racism, as I have defined it above: a simple preference, all other things being equal, for people of your own race. But what about racial hatred, chauvinism, and conflict? Surely these are not “divine love.” No, but they result from forcing different peoples together and creating a needless conflict between love of one’s own and getting along with others. However, this basic conflict—and the long train of hatreds and abuses that follow from it—can be eliminated by separating rival groups into their own communities.
O’Connor read Aquinas avidly. She even called herself a “hillbilly Thomist.”[12] I don’t know if she read these particular arguments, though, or encountered them in other contexts.[13] But her desire for racial separation was at least consistent with her professed Thomism, whether she knew it or not. Thomas Aquinas is pretty much a paradigm of a faithful Catholic. Thus O’Connor could have sincerely believed that God would take no offense at her racial separatism.
Then was the Lord protecting O’Connor from her fellow men? Presumably, O’Connor believed that God knew her thoughts whether she made them public or not. Thus she was concealing her back-to-Africa views only from other people. But why? Obviously, she feared their reactions. It was a radical idea championed by radical people. Thus is was bound to be unpopular. Beyond that, if O’Connor thought that “back to Africa” was too unpopular to even speak about it, she surely she thought it was politically unrealistic. And in the context of the American race question, O’Connor held that, “What’s best is what’s possible.”[14]
Notes
[1] Paul Elie, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?,” The New Yorker, June 15, 2020.
[2] Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 327.
[3] Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
[4] The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979) and Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: The Library of America, 1988).
[5] This correspondence is described somewhat more fully in Kathryn Krozer Laborde, Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), p. 23.
[6] Quoted in O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, p. 56.
[7] The Habit of Being, p. 330.
[8] The Habit of Being, p. 580.
[9] The Habit of Being, p. 587.
[10] O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, p. 65.
[11] Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 99.
[12] The Habit of Being, p. 81. See Father Damian Ference, Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art (Elk Grove Village, Illinois: Word on Fire, 2023).
[13] Some light on this could be shed by examining O’Connor’s personal library, which is housed at the Ina Dillard Russell Library at Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville. In addition to translations of Aquinas, she also owned books by Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Joseph Pieper, Frederick Copleston, and Victor White. Her copy of Anton C. Pegis, ed., Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Modern Library, 1945), is extensively marked up but does not contain the Questions on Charity. See Arthur Kinney, Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
[14] Gerald E. Sherry, An Interview with Flannery O’Connor (1963), in Conversations With Flannery O’Connor, ed. Rosemary M. Magee (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987), p. 103.
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19 comments
For me flannery O’Connor is among my top pure prose artists, together with Clark Ashton smith and Jack Vance. Odd grouping, I know.
I see she was as witty in her letters as in her stories! This excellent article confirms for me my interpretation of the story The Artificial N*gger. How did you guys interpret that story? I thought the subtext was a jab at those intellectual blacks that the liberal establishment holds up as exemplars—and I specifically had James Baldwin in mind. She’s saying, “you just haven’t really been around real blacks. You are basing your opinions on this artificially constructed individual who is really a sort of unicorn.” Libs are like the boy in the story! (Also darkly hinting that their works may not be their own?)
Another interesting message from a southern gothic writer is A Worn Path by Eudora Welty. Very sad.
Im making it a priority in my life to exhaust the well of flannery O’Connor! (And Greg)
The libshittery (which I include republicans in) only likes the social-construct blacks whose approved opinions port undisturbingly with foxjews like leo terrell or some Williamsburg-compatible jordan peele beta in the cosgrove wilkie glasses, in microdose numbers, and does White people things like not biting the heads off dead birds, riding vespa scooters, or for republicans, has a concealed carry permit and knows who his kids are. They don’t like bioreality stat blacks in bulk and keep those opinions on the hush-hush; “keep yoof on that side of the highway”, and always live White-dependent on soothing delusions that the extent of racial problems in amerika are not enough principal joe clarks and voting blue. It’s exhausting going thru this charade all the time.
I’m of the age to know that Guy Gibson of the Dambuster’s fame had a dog named Nigger. I also had a copy of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Nigger Boys. Christie’s version which I had in the 1950s had one of the Ten Little Nigger Boys going off to college and graduating as a lawyer. The update has the Little Nigger Boys cast as a bunch of dumb bunnies in something called Ten Little Indians. So who is the racist?
I think that Christie book – allegedly, the world’s bestselling book after the Bible – was originally Ten Little Niggers, which became Ten Little Indians, and which ended up as And Then There Were None (another line in the same children’s nursery rhyme). I read that book one time only, as a kid in the early 1970s, and, unlike so many other ‘Christies’, that’s the only one I can never reread as its plot is too memorable.
My college ex was named after Flannery O’Connor. If only she had inherited her racism as well. But I can only concur that increased exposure to blacks without the regime’s concomitant programming leads to a growing distaste of them. I would rejoice at never having to see them again.
O’Connor’s bemoaning of artificial negroes reminds me of the fatigue I’ve been experiencing with a particular Gain commercial that never seems to go away.
https://youtube.com/shorts/JawvaxKd3-k?si=fpWdOEE0I72xRBXR
In this advert, we are introduced to the <sarc>completely authentic</sarc> romantic interaction between the totally believably named “Brad” and “Jenn” over some freshly washed linens.
My question to the writers of this particular marketing propaganda, why not J’Markis and Ebony? And if you really want a commercial that captures the essence of the moment, why doesn’t Jasmine come into the laundry room and grab Ebony by her weave and accuse her of disrespecting her with her man?
Brad and Jenn? Lmao
I don’t know, but whenever I do the laundry, I always separate whites and colors.
I wonder if the stamps are still available. In a just and sane society, this wonderful article would appear in a top flight academic journal.
As far as I’m concerned, CC is a top flight academic journal.
And Flannery was a race-realist; not a racist.
There’s a major difference the knee-jerk libs don’t understand or gloss over.
Flannery was that strange kind of woman with whom one is not sure whether she is very pretty or grotesquely ugly. Was “Flannery” a real first name or was it a pseudonym? If it was a made-up name, was it somehow related to the inflammation caused by lupus?
Her full name was Mary Flannery O’Connor.
Does “Flannery” mean something? Why did Flannery keep the peacocks and peahens?
It is a family name on her mother’s side.
She liked birds and had peafowl, ducks, chickens, geese, and swans.
She certainly was no Grace Kelly, but grotesquely ugly is quite a far stretch.
The only woman who is undeniably attractive but just never did it for me even in her younger days is Uma Thurman and I don’t quite know why. Facially, she has the out of shape/in shape guy from the fifties thing happening. Hot but pass.
Loving the debate ITT about whether Flannery O’Connor was hot. This is both missing the point and getting the point at the same time. Based.
It’s just juvenile banter. No harm done. I’ve not read any of her works but she unquestionably looks wayyyy better than ariana grande or madonna.
Great article. Below are Catholic quotes supporting the moral value of segregation. Since I don’t believe the religion that flowed from the Vatican 2 event to be the Catholic religion, I don’t have to struggle like Emj does with race issues.
St. Augustine on Galatians 3:28:
• Difference of race or condition or sex is indeed taken away by the unity of faith, but it remains embedded in our mortal interactions, and in the journey of this life the apostles themselves teach that it is to be respected… For we observe in the unity of faith that there are no such distinctions. Yet within the orders of this life they persist.
So we walk this path in a way that the name and doctrine of God will not be blasphemed. It is not out of fear or anger that we wish to avoid offense to others but also on account of conscience, so that we may do these things not in mere profession, as if for the eyes of men, but with a pure love toward God.”
*[Regarding marriages between whites and Negroes] That there are lines between classes of people is a certainty that may as well be acknowledged at once, and the color-line is one of them. While it is entirely possible to ignore these lines, the social effect of such action is seldom happy. Just as a member of the true Church is earnestly dissuaded from marriage, by dispensation, with a non-member, so should a member of one race be dissuaded from marriage with a person of another color. In marriages of either type, there is a definite injustice done to children, there are almost inevitable misunderstandings between the parties themselves, and there is sure to be some friction between the families so gracelessly united.
-Glenn’s Class Manuals in Philosophy, Sociology, (1941), pg. 372
Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber
“From the Church’s point of view there is no objection whatever to racial research and race culture. Nor is there any objection to the endeavour to keep the national characteristics of a people as far as possible pure and unadulterated, and to foster their national spirit by emphasis upon the common ties of blood-which unite them. From the Church’s point of view we must make only three conditions: First, love of one’s own race must not lead to the hatred of other nations. Secondly, the individual must never consider himself freed from the obligation of nourishing his own soul by the persevering use of the means of grace which the Church provides. The young man who is always hearing about the blessedness of his own race is apt too easily to conceive that he is no longer bound by duties to God and His Church, duties of humility and chastity. Thirdly, race culture must not assume an attitude of hostility to Christianity,”
-Judaism, Christianity, and Germany, Third Question: What is the relation of Christianity to the German Race?, Pg. 107
Pope Pius XI
..however necessary and honorable be their function [race, the people, and the state] in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”
“No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country.”
– Papal Encyclical, Mitt Brennender Sorge, to the German Hierarchy, nn. 8 & 34
Pope Pius XII
**The Church of Jesus Christ…is the repository of His wisdom; she is certainly too wise to discourage or belittle those peculiarities and differences which mark out one nation from another. It is quite legitimate for nations to treat those differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.
The Church aims at unity, a unity determined and kept alive by that supernatural love which should be actuating everybody; she does not aim at a uniformity which would only be external in its effects and would cramp the natural tendencies of the nations concerned. Every nation has its own genius, its own qualities, springing from the hidden roots of its being. The wise development, the encouragement within limits, of that genius, those qualities, does no harm; and if a nation cares to take precautions, to lay down rules, for that end, it has the Church’s approval. She is mother enough to befriend such projects with her prayers provided that they are not opposed to the duties incumbent on men from their common origin and shared destiny.”
-Papal Encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, to the Universal Church, AAS 31
(1939) 428-29
St. John Chrysostom
Doctor of the Church
*And so says Isaiah, the chief of the Prophets, You shall not overlook your kinsmen of your own seed. Isaiah 58:7, Septuagint For if a man deserts those who are united by ties of kindred and affinity, how shall he be affectionate towards others? Will it not have the appearance of vainglory, when benefiting others he slights his own relations, and does not provide for them? And what will be said, if instructing others, he neglects his own, though he has greater facilities; and a higher obligation to benefit them?
Will it not be said, These Christians are affectionate indeed, who neglect their own relatives? He is worse than an infidel. Wherefore? Because the latter, if he benefits not aliens, does not neglect his near kindred. What is meant is this: The law of God and of nature is violated by him who provides not for his own family… It was the design of God, in uniting us by the ties of kindred, to afford us many opportunities of doing good to one another…
Because it is not the same thing to neglect our kindred, as to neglect a stranger. How should it be? But the fault is greater here, to desert one known than one who is unknown to us, a friend than one who is not a friend.”
-Commentary on 1 Timothy 5:8, “But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”
*The existence of distinct races is nowhere denied…Neither would the assertion that these races differ among themselves fall under the condemnation, because if they exist it follows that there must be diversity in order that they be
distinguishable at all. In addition the acknowledgement of this difference is
common enough in Church documents. Nor do the words “by their innate … character” cause difficulty, because races are essentially groups constituted by heredity, whose qualities in so far as they are racial must be congenital. This fact is likewise acknowledged by the catholic hierarchy.”
*It is worth recalling, before this discussion is concluded, the remark made earlier to the effect that this proposition does not rule out the possibility of a limited and accidental gradation of races. Because such a relative superiority and inferiority would not as such destroy the unity of mankind. Nor does it seem to be incompatible with the Church’s teaching concerning the general equality of all men.”
-Race, Reflections of Theologian,
Rev. Fr. Bonaventure Hinwood
O.F.M.
Pgs. 74-76
St. Thomas Aquinas
Universal and Angelic Doctor
“For it pertains to the statesman to know how large a city should be and whether it should include men of one race or of several. The size of the city should indeed be such that the region may be sufficiently productive and that it may be possible to repel external enemies. It should also preferably be made up of a single race in view of the fact that the men of the same race possess the same way of life and the same customs, which foster friendship among the citizens because of their resemblance. Accordingly, the cities that were constituted out of different races were ruined on account of the dissensions that arose in them due to the diversity of manners, for one part used to ally itself with [externall enemies out of hatred for the other part.”
-Commentary on Aristotle’s Polities, Bk. II, Ch. II
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