May 16, 2021 - "Happy Solemnity of the Ascension"

Happy Solemnity of the Ascension!  This is a special feast day in the history of the Church.  On the day that Jesus ascended to heaven to remain with his Father he commanded his disciples to carry on the task to proclaim the good news to the whole world.  Now, two thousand years later, we are the disciples who must carry out this task to proclaim the Gospel in word and deed.
 
Here is a question that I think all of us could consider today:  What can I do today to witness actively to my faith?  Do we speak up when someone says or does something unchristian?  Do we speak out against social injustice, political injustice, or economic injustice?  I want to single out an issue of social, political, and economic injustice for which our late beloved Father Ralph Kuehner advocated tirelessly for decades:  affordable housing for all.  This is a task that still remains before us.  The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has provided some good background information on Racism and Housing that I want to rely upon for the rest of this column.  This will help us appreciate the work that remains before us.
 
Decent housing is a basic human right—deserved by all due to their dignity as being created in God’s image.  Without decent, safe, and affordable housing, all aspects of family life suffer, and a life of dignity is impossible.  Yet an affordable housing crisis is a current reality in the U.S., and for minorities, it has been a reality throughout the nation’s history. 
 
After the Civil War, the great majority of freed slaves lived in the South, often in dilapidated shacks.  Such housing was provided by white landowners to Black sharecroppers who would work for free for the housing and a small portion of the crops.  The workers did not own the dwellings and could be evicted at any time.  With the Great Migration north in the beginning of the twentieth century to seek employment and better lives, African Americans were crowded into low-income housing in cities like Chicago or Detroit in areas that became increasingly segregated.
 
Later in the twentieth century, African Americans seeking housing were faced with both private and governmental prejudice.  Private homeowners, real estate agents, and private developers (such as the founder of Levittown) could, and would, refuse to sell to Black citizens, so they were confined to segregated areas.  The U.S. Federal Housing Administration policies and programs in the 1930s-1950s used strategies to deny mortgages, home loans, and home ownership to Blacks.  For example, the practice of redlining—actually drawing red lines on maps around predominantly African American neighborhoods to indicate where banks could not get federal insurance for loans they made—ensured that bans denied all mortgage requests from people in these areas.  African American WWII veterans were denied access to low-rate mortgages available to white veterans under the GI Bill.
 
The U.S. Government also built segregated public housing (as part of the New Deal in the 1930s), first for low-income whites, then for low-income Blacks.  With the housing boom after WWII, whites could leave public housing and buy low and moderate-priced houses in the growing suburbs with new means of financing; both the new suburbs and new forms of mortgages were closed off for African-Americans. 
 
They were often trapped in decaying older housing stock in certain urban blocks or in the blocks of public housing, poorly designed and poorly maintained by the Federal government.
 
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 required the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take “affirmative” steps to end housing discrimination and promote integration.  But after five decades, the federal housing discrimination ban has failed to end segregation and provide equal access to housing opportunities for all, particularly African Americans.  Today, many Latinos also face limited opportunities for decent housing.  Native Americans on reservations continue to live in substandard housing.  The plight of homelessness continues to be a major social problem, especially for minorities, who are a population more vulnerable to eviction.  The American Dream of owning decent homes still remains a distant dream for many in this country.
 
Let me close this column with a quotation from Saint John Paul II:
 
“Lord, our God, you created the human being, man and woman, in your image and likeness, and you willed the diversity of people within the unity of the human family.  At times, however, the equality of your sons and daughters has not been acknowledged, and Christians has been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion, consenting to acts of discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic differences.  Forgive us and grant us the grace to heal the wounds still present in your community on account of sin, so that we will all feel ourselves to be your sons and daughters.” (Universal Prayer on the Day of Pardon)
Until next week,
 
Fr. John Dillon
Pastor