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I read with great interest the article of March 22,2021 in The Seattle Times. The headline said, “A Christian Vision of Social Justice.” From previous columns I had learned that the writer, David Brooks, is of the Jewish faith but is very ecumenical, as the article indicates. His approach for division “is based on the idea that we are all made in the image of God. It abhors any attempt to dehumanize anybody on any front.” He then tells us, “Christian social justice emphasizes the importance of memory.

Today, many Americans are trying to tell the true history of our people, a tale that does not whitewash the shameful themes in our narrative nor downplay the painful but uneven progress - realist but not despairing.”

The article then moves to a discussion of sin. He writes, “Racism is not the problem as much as sin.” Then, in Christianity, as in Judaism, “we must confess the sin, ask for forgiveness for the sin, turn away from the sin, and restore the wrong done ... . If racism is America’s collective sin then the tasks are: tell the truth about racism, turn away from racism, offer reparations for racism.”

He then adds the names of some of those who have worked for social justice, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis in America, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany, who gave his life in opposing Hitler.

He quotes Esau McCaulley, a New Testament professor at Wheaton College, who asks, “Why is forgiveness required again and again? Why is forgiveness heard but the demand for justice ignored? When the Church is at its best it opens up the possibility of change, to begin again.”

This article recalls for me fourteen years on KOMO TV with the late Rabbi Raphael Levine and different Protestant ministers discussing issues of the day. It was at a time when many Americans were unhappy that John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was seeking to be president. We also discussed Christian-Jewish relationships. I often felt embarrassed by past Catholic policy toward Jews. I was very pleased when 2,000 Catholic bishops, with the Pope, on Dec.7, 1965, declared “that the human person has a right to religious freedom” and further declared that “the right is based on the very dignity of the human person.”

Rabbi Levine and I started an interfaith camp in Skagit County, which operated for fifty years until it was sold to Camp Korey in 2016. He died in 1985 but by that time we had agreed “that we must lead both Jews and Christians to admit that all our faiths are limited epressions of that total religious understanding of humanity. Hence, in a spirit of humility, and conscious of our uniqueness, we must stand ready to learn from each other as well as together from other religions.

David Brooks sums it up by saying “This vision has a destination, and thus walks not in bitterness but in hope.”

Father Treacy will be 102 years old this month.