"We Love You, but You Make Us Feel Guilty": Forging an Antipoverty and Civil Rights Agenda in the Catholic Church, 1964–90

In 1969, twenty priests in Newark, New Jersey, accused the Newark Archdiocese of ignoring the city’s growing rates of poverty and abetting racial discrimination in housing and education. The “Newark 20” warned that the “vacuous abandonment of the 500,000 black souls in your diocese will do more worldwide historical harm to Christ’s Church than the AntiChrists that have populated history.” The priests mocked Catholic leaders’ pretense at interracial fellowship, arguing that the Archdiocese and local priests more often reaffirmed than challenged the prejudices and fears of white parishioners living in a city that had recently shifted to a black majority: “We love you, Brothers and Sisters, but we’ll love you better over there—out of our sight. We love you, but you make us feel guilty.” They accused the church of leaning on the “promising rhetoric” of pastoral letters on the poor, while doing little to improve living conditions or challenge institutional racism in the city. My paper examines the context of this manifesto and the role of parish priests and lay Catholics in antipoverty and civil rights activism of the early 1960s. I show how their experiences laid the groundwork for Catholic criticism of both church hierarchy and government policy, establishing the basis for Catholic experiments in community economic development that sustained the War on Poverty long after the original programs had been dismantled. These experiments were produced by pressure for stronger lay leadership surging through the church in the 1960s, and by white and black Catholics’ efforts to forge interracial and urban-suburban collaboration, while responding to the trenchant criticism of Black Power advocates both inside and outside of the church. I conclude by inserting Newark Catholic activists within a national context and assessing the mixed results of their efforts.