The mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 Muslims, are an unspeakable tragedy, and we must pray for the victims and their families – and for the conversion of those who perpetrate such evils. Islam is not a race but a creed; nevertheless, it appears from reports that the shooter was inspired by racial hatred. It is worth reflecting, then, on the Church’s teaching about racism.
Racism is the belief that the intellectual and moral qualities of human beings, and the differences in achievement and fortune between nations, result from biological descent. On this theory, some "races" are intrinsically intellectually and morally superior to others. This is an idiotic superstition: by superstition, I mean the attribution without any rational basis of a disproportionate significance to merely bodily and external realities. But this superstition is also a heresy. It was, as Pope Paul III taught in 1537, created by the Devil. “The enemy of the human race,” Paul wrote, has “invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation”. This was the age of discovery, when European explorers were encountering new peoples. The heresy was that they were “dumb brutes…incapable of receiving the Catholic faith”. People who spread this lie intended to enslave the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
