The Mail
I’d like to offer prayers of thanksgiving to the Liguori Staff for their efforts in producing various fine issues of Liguorian. I’m proud to share the magazine with many friends.
—Chuck B., WI
The recent article by Fr. Byron Miller, CSsR, titled “Yearning to Breathe Free” (July-August 2019) was a beautiful rendition of the history of immigration in America. The article reflected the yearning heart of the immigrant met by a compassionate American heart. In a sense, it is the needing heart of Christ being welcomed by the loving heart of Christ in America’s traditional response. Lately, however, America’s heartbeat is faint. Let us return to the strong heartbeat that is our tradition and, indeed, is the love of Christ.
—Tom L., MI
I recently read “A Place of Blessing,” an article written by Fr. Byron Miller, in the September 2019 issue. The cover prompt, “Mary, Mother of the Delta,” caught my eye.
If no one else says it, I will say that the statue of Mary of the Delta is one of the most thoughtless, careless, and tone-deaf displays of white supremacy that I am aware of to be recently erected. The statue is an egregious affront to the generations of black Catholics who have worshiped under the oppression of white supremacy in the Mississippi Delta; those who have been ignored, diminished, relegated to the back of everything. How can a person stand in the Mississippi Delta and see only a western European image of Mary? I guess the answer is, it’s Mississippi and that is just the way things are down here.…
The image chosen for this statue is straight out of the 1950s. Mary was not Anglo-Saxon, and in today’s world to ignore that fact with the raising of a statue in the Mississippi Delta portraying a white woman is an indication of the sin of racism.
So. This is not a place for all people. This is another retreat space for white people and those they choose to bring within their circle, who want to pray to their white god in peace and security where no black images will offend them.
—Dierdre P., MS
