Mother of Sorrows: how racial injustice paralyzes the imago Dei

As a cradle Catholic accustomed to Marian devotion, I have the image of Mary cradling the limp and lifeless body of her murdered son eternally etched in my devotional psyche. So, too, one of her many litanies that Catholic devotees reel off with religious aplomb: "Mother of Sorrows."

For Black mothers all around the world, this epithet is not just a devotional label; it is an existential reality. The combination of elevated infant mortality, diseases and cruel conditions of life means that many of them bury their own children before their time. Artistic rendition of Mary's pietà entombs her voice in cold marble sculptures, faded frescoes and creased canvasses. Such frigid art belies her deep maternal sorrow.

The shooting of young African American Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin brought back haunting images of the pietà. As I contemplated the pietà, I could imagine what Mary is saying. Like many African American mothers, she laments: "Look what they've done to my child."

In these times of racial tension, injustice and violence, I hear Mary's searing lamentation in the voice of Blake's mother, Julia Jackson, weeping over her unarmed son shot at least seven times in the back by a police officer.

Strikingly, as Blake lay handcuffed to a hospital bed paralyzed from the waist down, his mother's appeal did not sound like a visceral cry of a sorrowing mother. Instead, hers was a calm voice echoing in the wilderness of our racial discontent, calling for healing and soul-searching. "Everybody, let's use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other," Jackson said.

Her emotional speech was devoid of anger, albeit her cheeks furrowed with hot tears portrayed the predicament of yet another African American Mother of Sorrows.

Something else was true in her lamentation; she captured the most fundamental story of the Judeo-Christian tradition that human beings, without exception, are created in the image and likeness of God as imago Dei. Each individual embodies, in his or her nature, the imago Dei fully and completely. And "no one is superior to the other." Racial diversity is part of God's plan, because, for Jackson, "God did not make one type of tree or flower or fish or horse or grass or rock."

The inviolable value of human life and the dignity of the human person lie at the core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and form the cornerstone of Catholic social tradition. But here is what troubles my soul: Again and again, individuals and structures of society conspire to violate and distort the imago Dei.

Racial intolerance leaves a trail of death, maiming and destruction. Amid a global public health pandemic that has killed almost a million lives across the world, America grapples with a pandemic of its own making: a systemic racism that targets Black bodies and Black lives violently.