Gloria Purvis is one of the most important and incisive Catholic voices in the United States today.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Purvis — a prominent pro-life advocate — used her platform as host of the EWTN radio show Morning Glory to bring the fullness of Catholic teaching to bear on issues of racial justice and police brutality.

In December, her show was canceled.

This May, Purvis launched The Gloria Purvis Podcast with America Media, where she hosts conversations on issues including critical race theory, religious liberty, vaccine mandates and the dangers of celebrity priesthood.

“These conversations are meant to unfold some of the biggest things that we are dealing with, but to show people that you can have these conversations in respectful, loving ways, even if you don’t agree,” she said. “But the point is to be able to hear and listen to these voices.”

Purvis will be a keynote speaker at this year’s Cornerstone Catholic Conference, which will be presented virtually on October 30. The conference, created by the bishops of Washington state in 2014, aims to unite Catholics in our mission to advocate for life and justice. Registration is free at WACatholics.org.

Gloria Purvis spoke with Northwest Catholic by phone on August 11. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

NWC: At the Cornerstone Catholic Conference, you’ll be speaking about the racial justice and pro-life movements. Could you give a quick overview of your own involvement in those movements? 

Gloria Purvis: I’ve always believed in the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death, and that involves all aspects of the human person. So when there are attacks against the human person, whether because they’re in the womb, because of their race, because of their immigrant status or economic status — attacks on their human dignity — I am involved. I will speak, I will do things, I will go wherever the Lord is sending me.

So when George Floyd’s murder happened and it was televised and shared so widely, I saw that there was a brokenness among Catholics in being able to receive our teaching of human dignity and apply it in this case. So I started to speak more about it and encourage people to embrace the teachings of the Church, to embrace loving another person. These are the things we say in the pro-life movement, right? We encourage people to love the child in the womb and recognize the dignity of the human person of the unborn, even in difficult circumstances. It’s no different for George Floyd. And it was quite distressing to see some pro-life people use the same arguments and tactics as pro-abortion people to dehumanize George Floyd and to try to sever any feelings of empathy anybody would have for him.

The title of your keynote address is “What Do the Racial Justice and Pro-Life Movements Have in Common?” What’s your answer to that question? 

Gosh, I don’t want to give away the key to the talk before it happens! I want people to come and hear it. Let’s just say, I think it will orient people’s thinking to what the Church says about the human person. But too often, I think people look toward secular sources to try to decipher or determine how they should feel or act about something. I’m inviting everybody to turn back to Jesus, to turn back to the Church and what she says about the human person, and let that be our lens for examining and analyzing these challenges, these sins, these great evils.

The pro-life and racial justice movements are often seen as almost mutually exclusive — pro-life is “conservative,” racial justice is “liberal” or “progressive.” What’s the danger in looking at these issues purely through the lens of politics?

We empty it of Christ. Christ is not there. And when you make it all about simply politics, then it becomes merely about power, and retaining our power is the temptation. To look at it as merely temporal politics, it divorces Christ from it. It divorces what we believe as Catholics from this whole equation. And when you do that, when you empty it of that, I think it’s much easier to be seduced by the temptations of the evil one, because we’re listening to every voice but God’s.

How should Catholics respond to the growing polarization and tribalism that we see in our country and in our Church? 

Yeah, it’s quite distressing, isn’t it? I think Catholics need to realize that the only side we need to be on is Jesus’ side. There are a lot of polarizing figures right now in the Catholic Church in the United States, and we should be asking ourselves: When you listen to this person speak, do their words bring you closer to Christ? Are these people following and being obedient to the legitimate authority of the bishop? Look at the saints. They were obedient, and the Lord loves obedience.

I see all these nonsensical things like, “Oh, I don’t want to go over there because they’re conservative.” “Oh, they’re progressive, they’re liberal.” Why would you let any of that stop you from following where Christ is inviting you to go? Why would you let any of these labels keep you from being an authentic disciple of Jesus Christ? If you look at what we believe as Catholics, some people might consider you progressive on a particular issue and conservative on another, but all you are is faithful to Jesus, faithful to the teachings of the Church. And that is what matters.

And we’re not going to have any friends, we’re going to make everybody mad, because we’re not trying to be friends to current political thinking, we’re trying to be disciples of Jesus Christ. And the only opinion we need to be concerned about is that of Christ. At judgment day, we all are going to face him, and we’ll have to account for what we did or did not do. We’ll have to account for every cruel word, every cruel tweet, every selfish action, but then we’ll also have to account for the good and generous things we did, the sacrifices, all of that.

I am quite worried about the polarization because it obscures the truth of the human person. You should always be on the side of Christ, who is always going to be with the downtrodden and oppressed — always. He’s not going to be with the proud and the mighty. He’s just not.

Last year felt like a watershed moment in our national conversation about race. What impact did seeing the video of George Floyd’s murder have on you?

It made me sick. It made me physically ill, and I regret that I saw it, because it haunts, it haunts, it haunts. Over and over, “Mama, Mama,” I can hear him crying out for his mama. I can hear him saying he can’t breathe. I can see him struggling. And to see someone suffer so much reminds me of watching those videos that show when a child loses their life [in an abortion], and those are horrible, traumatic things. But it reminded me — not that I needed reminding — of the terrible injustice that can happen in policing, and that police brutality is a grave evil.

No human being deserves to be treated in that manner by our police. And if you couldn’t look at that and be horrified, if you looked at that and then started to listen to those people who wanted you to believe he’s a terrible person, therefore he deserved that — guess what. Even terrible people don’t deserve to be treated that way. And he wasn’t a terrible person. But even if he were, terrible people don’t deserve to be treated that way. And that’s where I think Catholics are missing so much. We want to only have compassion for the perfect. And I’m like, If that’s the case, woe to us on judgment day, because we certainly aren’t perfect. I looked at that and I just saw a human person being brutally murdered, tortured. And it made me ill.

You’ve said that you received a lot of hate mail for speaking out about racism and police brutality following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. What was it like for you to get that kind of reaction, even from fellow Catholics who professed to be pro-life?

Fellow self-identified Catholics who claim to be devout, all that. It was eye-opening how much people have compartmentalized the Church’s teaching and haven’t really absorbed it to understand that it’s for every human person. Every human person is worthy of dignity and respect — not just the perfect, not just the innocent, but everybody, even the people we dislike the most. And if we don’t understand that, then we need to spend more time praying, reading the saints, reading the Gospel, going to Mass and asking God to soften our hearts so that the bonds of the human family can be restored.

It was eye-opening how many Catholics are in the grips of the enemy, how many Catholics are racist — have racist beliefs and attitudes — and don’t see how it conflicts with their faith. And I saw people in bondage, and they needed evangelizing and liberation. And I saw the brokenness, just complete brokenness. And I was thinking, Oh my gosh, would you ever say these things publicly? Would you ever say these things to my face? Some might. But the fact that they would take the time to write it down and spew the kind of racist venom that they spewed, while at the same time identifying themselves as believers and followers of Jesus Christ — it was just shocking.

But then I started to realize these people are being conditioned by who they listen to, what kind of people they’re around. And it also made me think: They haven’t heard anything from the pulpit that’s broken this line of thinking. And it also made me think: What do we need to do in the pro-life movement to root out that fallacious thinking?

What sustains your faith in the face of evil and opposition and discouragement? 

Well, I came into the Catholic Church through a mystical experience with the Eucharist, and I’ve never wavered from the knowledge that the Eucharist is real, that it’s alive and that it’s Jesus. And so I’m like a barnacle on the side of a ship — I’m attached, and even going through a storm is not going to get me off the ship of the Church, because I know Jesus is real, he’s here, this is his Church.

I pray, I read the lives of the saints, I have good friends who pray for me and speak with me, and the support of my husband, my family. And I talk to God a lot, a lot, a lot! If something’s troublesome, I talk to him about it. If something’s going good, I talk to him about it. I can be cooking and I’m talking with him — he’s here.

And when things start to get hard, I say, “Help me!” And I know he will, even if it means that he just wants me to bear it, just to suffer through it. Sometimes there is no relief, and that’s a part of our faith walk. The cross can be heavy. Until my will is conformed perfectly with his, the cross can be a suffering. It can be heavy. I’m not yet at the place where I’m perfectly clothed in his will so that all my crosses are sweet to me even though they’re heavy sufferings, but that’s the goal.

You’ve said that “a lot of racism has infected people in the Church,” even among Catholics who would never consider themselves racist. What are some of the subtle ways that can happen and manifest itself? 

Well, it manifests itself in the fact that they can watch a Black man be murdered on video and feel no empathy. The empathy they would have had, the compassion they would have had, if he were in the womb, it evaporated once he’s outside the womb. Why is that?

Another thing I find interesting is, even in the images and iconography of Christ or the Blessed Mother or the Holy Family, if I’ve ever shared anything where they were African, where they were Black, people would just get irate and say, “That’s not historically accurate” or “Why are you being political?” — but they feel fine with a Norwegian-looking Jesus. They need to examine why it is that they have a negative reaction, or this impulsive need to demand historical accuracy — but it’s only ever when he’s Black, never when he’s looking Swedish.

How would you respond to someone who says, “Look, we abolished slavery, we had the civil rights movement, we had a Black president — why are we still talking about racism?”

Because it’s a sin and people can go to hell for it. That’s why we’re still talking about it in the Catholic Church.

And also, when people say things like that — woo! What a total dismissing of people’s desire for justice and equality, right? Justice means a person getting what they deserve, right? So when people talk about racism, they talk about people being treated unjustly, and that’s not conducive to the common good. People are still suffering from racism, whether they’re the person doing racist acts or somebody suffering from the consequences of racist acts.

And how dare you? That’s the other thing I want to say when people say that: How dare you try to tell somebody they should be satisfied with what they have, they should be satisfied with any level of mistreatment? That’s the part that I find most galling, you know: “You should be satisfied. It’s not as bad as it was.” Well, it’s not where it’s supposed to be. You can’t slap me in the face and knock my teeth out and tell me, “Well, at least you’re not getting slapped in the face anymore.”

People act like the consequences of sin don’t outlive the person that committed the sin. Well, guess what. We’re dealing with centuries, the consequences of centuries of this sin in our country. And I keep wondering why people think racism is such a special sin that it all of a sudden doesn’t exist anymore. How dare you? They are preferring their comfort over the requirement that we, as believers of Jesus Christ, serve and help others, especially the oppressed and downtrodden. They are preferring their comfort when they say things like, “Why are we still talking about it?” They’re indicating to me that they don’t want to be bothered with the work of evangelizing and helping to redeem the world and helping to combat evil. They prefer their comfort.

Why are we still talking about it? Because it’s a sin that sends people to hell and we need to be involved to undo it. That’s part of our life’s work.

There are some Catholics who are ready to affirm that racism is evil, but they get upset when people talk about systemic racism or structural racism or institutional racism. How do you understand these ideas, and are they compatible with Catholic teaching? 

Yeah, because we talk about “structures of sin.” It’s the same thing. John Paul II talked about structures of sin. It’s the same thing. And he even talked about how hard it is because they become embedded structures.

And why would people think it wouldn’t be that way? In the pro-life movement, we talk about organized, industrial-level abortion in this country. Why do they think there isn’t an organized evil around race, especially considering the history in our country of the laws that we had in place, the customs, traditions, beliefs, attitudes, portrayals of Black people in art and media that were meant to demean them? Why do we think that passing a few laws all of a sudden undid centuries of that kind of conditioned thinking and attitudes that people have?

What do you think about the uproar over critical race theory? 

Ha! OK, so half these people — no, three quarters of these people don’t know what critical race theory is. It’s a legal theory that you learn in law school — if you study it. It deals with law and the history of law. And it’s extremely difficult, it’s nuanced. There’s no way they’re teaching it in kindergarten through 12th grade. No way!

It’s absurd, and it’s just another way to create a straw man. They use the term “critical race theory” as a cover for opposing racial justice. It’s another bait and switch. Instead of dealing with police brutality: “Oh my gosh, it’s critical race theory! Ooo!” It really disappoints me, the large number of people who are just basically dishonest about this. It is very disappointing that there are a large number of Catholics who opine on critical race theory and have never read anything by critical race theorists. And all this nonsense about “Oh, it’s Marxist, it’s this-and-that.” It’s bogeyman stuff, just like they did to the civil rights movement — it was “communist.” And I have to laugh — as if Black people in this country needed Karl Marx to tell them about injustice in the law. Ha! It’s absurd. It’s absurd.

You’ve spoken often about making spiritual acts of reparation. What does that mean, and why do you think it’s so important? 

Because we want to make repair for the evil that is done. Catholics are used to acts of reparation, right? We make reparation for sacrilege, right? We can make reparation for the sin of racism. We can do holy hours. We can pray. We can fast. We can do all these things with that intention, and we should. And we should also ask the Lord to reveal how that might be in us: “Lord, please show me my brokenness. Liberate me of these things.” I mean, why wouldn’t we? Catholics treat racism as if it’s not a sin. And it is, it’s a grave one, and people can go to hell for it. And once they start to wake up to that, they’ll recognize that things like reparation make sense.

Is there anything else you would want to mention that we haven’t touched on? 

I think people need to understand that we’re in a fallen world, and we’re to be in the world, but not of the world, right? That means that we have to pursue, to our dying breath, to grow in holiness, to grow in union with God. And we do that by being his hands, his feet, his eyes, his ears in how we treat our neighbor and also how we treat ourselves. And there’s a lot of difficulty now in understanding who is our neighbor and who we are. And I always figure we need to go back to: What does God say about who we are? And we can find this in Scripture and in the teachings of the Church and in the writings of the saints. These are the things that we need to meditate on and also act on.