Act Justly: Healing Racism through Faith

Rev. Henry Sands delivered the 2019 Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C. Lecture on Catholic Social Tradition, discussing racism against Native Americans from historical, personal, and theological perspectives. Preserving hope in the face of racism has been both challenging and elusive for Native Americans due to historical trauma from government policies of genocide, annihilation, termination, and relocation—yet this is precisely the message that Fr. Sands brings to Native American communities across the country. Fr. Sands is the Executive Director of the Black and Indian Mission Office in Washington, D.C., a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit, and a member of the Ojibway, Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes, who are known together as Anishnaabe.

The annual Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C. lecture was created by the Center for Social Concerns in 2009 in order to highlight the issues and themes within the Catholic social tradition, and to inspire students to live out Fr. Bernie’s teaching on social justice.