Fr. Bryan Massingale, a leading Catholic theologian in the U.S., says he read Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez’s Nov. 4 speech to a Catholic group in Spain with “dismay and disbelief.”
Gomez, who is also the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, claimed that some modern social justice movements were Marxist-inspired, anti-Christian “pseudo-religions.”
“He has a serious misunderstanding, and perhaps even a willed ignorance, about the goals and motivations of contemporary social justice movements,” said Massingale, a Fordham University theologian and author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.
Massingale and other Black Catholics told NCR that they were appalled at how Gomez framed today’s social justice activism, including the anti-racist movement in the United States, as an angry expression of a corrosive secularism being pushed by an “elite leadership class.”
