Dr. Jacqueline C. Rivers, Director of Harvard’s Seymour Institute for Black Church Studies, Says Marriage ‘Was Stolen from Blacks During Slavery’; ‘Material, Moral, and Spiritual Consequences Have Been Devastating’
Highlights from Dr. Jacqueline C. Rivers’ address at the Vatican’s #Humanum Colloquium on Marriage and the Family
Watch the full video below.
“Across the United States and Europe, sexual partnerships between persons of the same sex [and] of the same gender are being legally recognized as marriage, thus abolishing in law the principle of marriage as a conjugal union and reducing it to nothing other than sexual or romantic partnerships or domestic companionship. The unavoidable message is a profoundly false and damaging one — that children do not need a mother and a father in a permanent and complementary bond… In the United States, those who promote what they call marriage equality have unjustly appropriated the language and mantle of the black struggle in the United States — the Civil Rights Movement. But there can be no equivalence between blacks’ experience of slavery and oppression and the circumstances of homosexuals.”
“God has called us to a sacred duty to defend the innocent and the disadvantaged, the children and the poor. The religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows who are in distress and keep ourselves from being polluted by the world as it says in James 1:27. We must relentlessly police ourselves whether we are the black church or Roman Catholic, Muslim, or Orthodox Jew, to ensure that no predators amongst us take advantage of these innocents.”
BCNN1 WP 
This heading:
“Rebukes the Pope, the Catholic Church, and Others for Abuse of Innocent Children to Their Faces at the Vatican”
…doesn’t seem accurate to me.
Dr. Rivers was including her own Christian community along with the Roman Catholic Church (and Muslims and Jews) when she put forth her warning about the protection of young people. In fact, by her including her own community and other non-Christian religions alongside the naming of the Catholic Church, it would appear that she was actually reminding her audience that the abuse of children and young people is a problem not only amongst Catholic clergy.
It would not have been received by anyone in the audience as a pointed slam or rebuke specifically against the Roman Catholic Church (much less against the Pope, who is not even mentioned by her). As a Catholic priest, I for one did not take it as such. I thought she was very balanced, professional and inspiring. I think you are mis-reading her intentions. The headline also reads this whole speach as if Dr. Rivers came to the Vatican to “teach those Catholic a lesson” when in fact she was invited. She also begins her speech by acknowledging how honored she was to present among a distinguished international and inter-religious crowd of scholars, a gathering organized and made possibly by the Vatican.
So I think this heading is very ungracious and uncharitable. The whole idea of the conference was to help build unity amongst like minded people of different Christian traditions and religions on the issue of the complementarity of man and woman and the importance of marriage in today’s day and age. Dr. Rivers apparently thinks this way as well. She speaks of a world wide movement to defend traditional marriage. Why would she speak in such a way as to polarize groups within the larger group she is seeking to unify?