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October 5, 2020
Zack Brown
San Francisco
I’m a product of 13 years of Catholic school in San Francisco. I met most of my close friends in Catholic school and we graduated from high school in ‘04. We don’t go to church anymore and we never even talk about why. It seems the Catholic Church failed to keep almost an entire generation of young Catholics in this city engaged. But we still care about the community and carry the values instilled in us by the school system and teachers we had. We care about equality for the LGBTQ community and the BLM movement. We were taught that killing humans is wrong.
The political environment in this country feels like a fight right now and dangerously close to a war. We don’t look to the Catholic Church for help. Attorney General Bill Barr is the most powerful Catholic in the country at the moment. Last year he reinstated the federal death penalty and the government is executing its seventh prisoner since July this week. Recently he was honored at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast as one of “Christ’s People of Faith.”
As we fight for what we believe in and think about where our kids should learn these same values, we might think of the schools we went to and the teachers we had. But we don’t expect anything from the leadership of the Catholic Church as one of “Christ’s People of Faith” oversees the scheduling of more executions. A church that includes Bill Barr does not align with our values. A church that throws its weight around and tries to stop a killer would get our attention. It could bring us back.
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