When six Sikh men and women in Oak Creek, Wisconsin were murdered while at worship, for the first time in many years I thought of my Sikh uncle. In the weeks that followed the shooting, I found myself talking with my mother about him and his personality, history, brothers, sisters, and friends. In the 1960s, my mother’s sister met and fell in love with Gurgit while they were students in upstate New York. My Northern Minnesotan grandfather was delighted to welcome him into our family, and he came to enjoy the warmth of my family’s huge Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, though he never quite got used to the bitter cold. My grandfather was happy to have him as a son-in-law because of his curiosity, openness to service, and his intelligent, peaceful, creative manner. When my uncle died—several years before I was born—my aunt and young cousin came back to the Iron Range to live. Gurjit was present in the face of my cousin, in the photos on the walls, and in his brothers who came during the summers to visit their nephew.

Several years ago, through a good friend of mine, I got to know Valarie Kaur and her work as a chronicler of both the Sikh and the millennial American experience. Her film, Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath, documents the hate crimes committed against Sikh Americans in the aftermath of 9/11. Through telling the stories of the men and women who have experienced this violence, she forces her viewers to confront what it means to be an American in a country where the first person murdered in retaliation for the terrorist attacks was a Sikh man wearing a turban. Out of a painful subject, she brings us into hopeful dialogue, moving beyond divisive identity politics and into a language based on common respect for human dignity.

On August 5, as I learned of the shooting, I felt my stomach sink, as my thoughts went this time to my family in Minnesota and to the young Sikh Americans who, in the face of hate and ignorance, have repeatedly chosen to dedicate their lives to hope, to the common good. In the next several weeks, they didn’t sleep, alternating between comforting and organizing their communities and doing innumerable press appearances to educate the American public. Through the Sikh Coalition, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), Groundswell, and other organizations, men and women our age fought for religious pluralism. While they straightforwardly admitted that their brothers and sisters had been murdered because they were mistaken for Muslims, they also reached out and collaborated immediately with their sisters and brothers in the Muslim American community seeking a place in our shared America. They rejected an interpretation that hate against Muslims was somehow OK, or less dehumanizing or terrible.

As I was processing the courage shown by these young Americans, I wondered what my religious tradition said about Oak Creek and how Catholics could respond. With the 50th anniversary of Vatican II approaching, I wondered if I might find anything there. Happening upon Nostra Aetate: The Declaration on the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions, I was struck by the beauty and strength of this foundational document. It begins and ends powerfully:

[1] In our age, when the human race is being daily brought closer together and contacts between the various nations are becoming more frequent, the church is giving closer attention to what is its relation to non-Christian religions. In its task of promoting unity and charity among people, indeed also among nations, it now turns its attention chiefly to what things human beings have in common and what things tend to bring them together.

All nations are one community and have one origin, because God caused the whole human race to dwell on the whole face of the earth. They also have one final end, God, whose providence, manifestation of goodness and plans for salvation are extended to all, until the elect be gathered together in the holy city which the bright light of God will illuminate and where the people will walk in his light. Women and men expect from the different religions an answer to the obscure riddles of the human condition which today also, as in the past, profoundly disturb their hearts. What is a human being? What is the meaning and purpose of our life? What is good and what is sin? What origin and purpose do sufferings have? What is the way to attaining true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? Lastly, what is that final unutterable mystery which takes in our lives and from which we take our origin and towards which we tend? …

[5] We cannot, however, call upon God the Father of all if we refuse to behave like sisters and brothers towards certain people created to the image of God…The church therefore condemns as foreign to the mind of Christ any kind of discrimination whatsoever between people, or harassment of them, done by reason of race or color, class or religion.

This document, when lived out, is a tool within my own tradition that fights against the intolerance that has left daughters without mothers, fathers without sons, husbands without wives, friends without dear friends. Whether we’re aware of the text or not, young Catholics believe that embracing religious dialogue and standing up against discrimination is a constituent element of our faith. In our current climate of polarization and hatred—Valarie herself was called a terrorist for the “crime” of promoting dialogue—young Catholics can go back to this text—which brings us squarely back to the Gospel messages—and demand that we live more courageously, that we defend those who society tells us are strangers, outcasts and less than human.

Three concrete ways that we can do this are:

1.     Urge the FBI to track hate crimes against Sikhs. Before Oak Creek, there was no category in which they could be tracked.

2.     Urge our local police departments to permit Sikh officers to wear turbans. This year, the Washington DC Police Department became the first large department to permit Sikhs to serve as police officers without having to abandon their articles of faith.

3.     We can all seek out space for inter-religious dialogue and education. While we may already be involved in such spaces, the Department of Education’s Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships program provides a wealth of resources to connect us with one another.