Cathleen Crayton isn't afraid to talk about race. In fact she lives for the kinds of conversations many people fear as taboo or too controversial.
With her kind and modest demeanor, Crayton --- known by friends as Cathy --- has invited and welcomed parishioners, and even a bishop, to her Claremont home to dialogue about race relations. She's taken her passion around the country facilitating white, black and brown Catholics to talk about ways in which skin color has affected their lives.
"Race is a fundamental division, and we're a long way off from realizing the oneness of humanity," Crayton recently told The Tidings. "I believe in the justice of this. The 'race thing' is an issue God is calling us to be reckoned with."
Recently, Crayton was honored by the Catholic peace organization Pax Christi USA with the Ambassador of Peace award for her dedicated and sustained effort to make the peace movement more representative of people of color.
She joins other previous honorees like Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, founding bishop president of Pax Christi USA; Eileen Egan, the first layperson and first woman to work for Catholic Relief Services and a Pax Christi USA co-founder; and Jesuit Father John Dear, former executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the country.
No stranger to divisive, volatile issues, Crayton got involved in justice work during the early 1980s when parishioners at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Claremont were hotly debating whether the parish should declare itself a sanctuary for Central American refugees fleeing from war. Many educational workshops later, parishioners reached a simple majority vote, but not the two-thirds needed. The experience created bitterness and divisiveness. At an impasse, parishioner George Gould went to a Pax Christi conference and returned with a little hope.
"He brought back the idea of peacemaking in our own parish," remembers Crayton. "This was a really wonderful way of not only keeping the issue [of sanctuary] in our hearts, but also reconciling with the people who did not support this. Pax Christi really is about personal non-violence, Gospel non-violence interiorly.
"You can't claim to love God if you do not love your neighbor. I mean it's just so simple," she continues. "I think salvation for me is working out how do you love your neighbor."
Perhaps simple, but not easy, Crayton acknowledges.
"What I don't like in a person, I try to realize it represents something I don't like about myself," she says.
An individual ethic of peacemaking included developing one's capacity for prayer, reflection, study and action. Crayton was consoled by the group's introspective perspective on reconciliation, and there began her more than two-decades association with Pax Christi --- the Peace of Christ.
Anti-racism initiative
Crayton, an African-American, has worked in the largely white peace movement in numerous capacities on the local, regional and national level. Most significantly, she was on the committee that eight years ago "conceptualized, midwifed and birthed" a 20-year initiative to eliminate racism within the organization whose members are mostly white, affluent and hold post-graduate degrees. Meanwhile the U.S. Catholic Church is becoming more diverse.
Crayton thinks it will take 50 years. "The idea is that it's not something that happens overnight. People think, 'Oh, we've dealt with that. We can move on.' It doesn't work that way," she says.
Committed to the slow, ongoing process of personal and organizational transformation, one of the first goals of Pax Christi's "Brothers and Sisters All" initiative was to come to a common analysis of racism. "I say racism and I mean one thing; you say racism and you mean another," Crayton observes. "We had to have a common language, common meaning."
Racism, it was finally agreed, is racial prejudice, plus the sanctioned abuse of institutional and systemic power.
Next, the Pax Christi Anti-Racism Team developed a day-long workshop for members of local groups to examine their individual stereotypes and assumptions about themselves and one another.
"We're all burdened with stereotypes," says Crayton. "You can work hard, be educated and overcome the stereotype. But if you are a member of a racially stigmatized group, that stigma doesn't go away."
A member of the anti-racism team until 2004, Crayton used her personal vacation time criss-crossing the country giving workshops. She encouraged and welcomed Pax Christi members to be open about the stereotypes and racial stigmas they carry. The workshops have been insightful, but not comfortable.
"It takes a lot for an organization to self-critique itself," she says, appreciating the organizational commitment and "the people who have ventured into this really difficult territory. We've developed a tolerance to social sin and we're breaking down that tolerance."
Childhood awakening
Crayton was born 51 years ago in Omaha to a white mother and a black father. Her parents had to marry in Minnesota because interracial marriages weren't recognized in Nebraska. As a young girl traveling through the South one summer, she quickly learned that society saw her as black when she and her family were told that part of a recreational park was off limits to blacks.
"If there was ever any ambivalence or ambiguity before, there was not after that," she says. "It was an awakening."
After her parents divorced and her father remarried, Crayton and her sister stayed with their father and moved to Los Angeles. The family welcomed a baby brother. She graduated from Gary High School in Pomona and from Boston University with a degree in economics.
An avid reader, Crayton studies the history of racism in America, including the assimilation of European ethnic communities into adopting white privilege and racist attitudes while at the same time losing much of their ethnic cultural heritage.
"It really is about the power of institutions and systems to mold individual racist behavior and attitudes," she says. "With focused anti-racism training within organizations and institutions over time --- over a long time --- perhaps that stigma will go away."
People of color now serve on the Pax Christi national council. "The idea is to be accountable to people of color," she says, and to be able to share decision making and power.
Crayton also juggles a full-time job as project administrator for the Brain Architecture Center at USC which researches structures of the brain that organize motivated behavior like thinking, reproduction or foraging for food. She volunteers on the San Gabriel Regional Pastoral Council and on the archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission. She's a board member of Network, a national Catholic social justice lobby.
San Gabriel Region Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala, who's attended Crayton's home-based small group dialogues on race, describes her as dedicated. "She has a passion for justice," he says. Her pastor, Msgr. Thomas Welbers, credits her "long-standing commitment" and "warm-heartedness." Cambria Smith, former chair of the archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission, says Crayton is a "prophetic voice" on the commission, raising people's consciousness to ensure that workshops include panelists from diverse backgrounds.
Ultimately for Crayton, the social and the personal are deeply linked. Societal transformation begins with a personal spiritual conversion, she says.
"Finding God in every single person --- that's a challenge," she says. "That transcends race."
Editor's note: For more information on Pax Christi, see www.paxchristiusa.org
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