Culture is the attitudes, customs and beliefs that a person uses to make sense of life and the world. Culture can include obvious things like celebration of holidays, dress, music or ways of showing hospitality. Culture also describes more subtle things like how one views and mourns death or the meaning of the relationship between parent and child. Sometimes European Americans, who at present are the majority race in our country, can mistakenly believe that their culture is normativ e and that other people somehow need to advance to the point where they assimilate into our culture. True racial justice does not require anyone to surrender his or her culture before being allowed to belong to and receive the benefits of our society.
Cultural prejudice can be present in our churches.
Religious expression is the most sacred part of any culture because it touches our relationship with God and embodies ourbeliefs about life and death, meaning and hope, sin and salvation. Some Catholics have tried to maintain an impossible distinction that people of all races are welcome in our churches, but that their unique cultural expressions of faith are not. Such people may even believe that Catholics of cultures different from theirs need to be purified of the need to express their faith in their own languages or culture. Such an attitude is unworthy of the Gospel. It is the policy of the Archdiocese and indeed of the Catholic Church to insist that all Catholics share one faith, but that no one be asked to abandon his or her own culture.