Black Catholic History Month

Alert: shifting from Bishops and Vatican! From Synods and Communion! Commemorative weeks exist to remind us to think beyond our immediate concerns, and I will do that this week, relying first on historian Shannen Dee Williams of Villanova University, who has done so much to recover the story of American Catholic sisters. What stands out to me in an interview with the McGrath Institute Blog at Notre Dame is another shift she suggests we make: 

For many people in the West, Catholicism is synonymous with whiteness and Europeanness. However, such perceptions of the faith erase the Church’s early roots in Africa, which preceded the development and embrace of Catholicism in Europe by nearly four centuries. Contemporary characterizations of Catholicism as a European or white religion also ignore the fact that nearly one-fourth of the Church’s faithful in the world today are people of African descent.

November was chosen when the week was established in 1990 by the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus because it contains several important dates in Black Catholic history: “the birth date (November 13) of St. Augustine, the first Church Doctor from Africa, and the feast day (November 3) of St. Martin de Porres, a seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian lay brother and champion of racial equality. In 1962, Porres became the first person of African descent to be canonized from the Americas.” Already we have an example of the span in time and in prominence of Black Catholics.  

Williams is a strong advocate, and never fails to mention the work of Black Catholic sisters in teaching this history in their schools. “Like Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Negro History Week, black nuns understood the subversive power of black history in the face of rampant discrimination, misrepresentation and erasure. Because many black nuns were the descendants of the free and enslaved black people whose labor and sales built the early American church, they also recognized how essential teaching black Catholic history was in the fight against racism in their church.” 

Williams also never fails to mention Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB, whose 1990 history inspired the NBCCC action and many more historians. That meeting also inspired the creation of the National Black Sisters Conference in 1968. In 2008 Davis prepared a “Timeline” for US Catholic, which is a brief outline of this history. At the same time it illustrates the difference in his approach from that of  Williams and other younger scholars. The following long quote from her McGrath interview should give you an idea of her approach: 

"The Catholic Church became the first and largest slaveholder in the Americas. (Note: In Brazil, which received the greatest percentage of enslaved Africans transported into the Americas, the Jesuits were at the center of the brutal sugar economy and the largest slaveholders.) The story of the Catholic Church in the land area that became the United States did not begin in the English Catholic colony of Maryland in the seventeenth century. It began, rather, in the Spanish Catholic colony of Florida, where free and enslaved Black Catholics helped to establish and build St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, in the sixteenth century. The first Christian marriage in North America took place between a free Black Catholic woman from Spain and a Spanish soldier in the diocese of St. Augustine in 1565. Free and enslaved Black Catholics also built and funded most of the nation’s earliest Catholic Churches, schools, seminaries, monasteries, and convents. Because of the nature of slavery, many of these pioneering Black Catholics also had blood ties to the nation’s earliest European Catholic families, including the Spaldings and Carrolls, who gave the U.S. Church its earliest bishops, as well as several pioneering white and black sisters. Catholics must also never forget that Roger B. Taney, the nation’s first Catholic Supreme Court justice, infamously declared that Black people had no rights which “the white man was bound to respect,” while denying the freedom petitions of Dred and Harriet Scott and their two daughters in 1857. 

While the bulk of scholarly attention to the African American Catholic community has focused on the colonial period to   the abolition of slavery, the story of Black Catholics and their pivotal struggles to dismantle racial segregation and exclusion in the Church and wider society in the twentieth century is equally rich and deserves more attention.

I developed the Twitter hashtags #BlackHistoryIsCatholicHistory, #CatholicHistoryIsBlackHistory, and #BlackCatholicHistoryAlwaysMatters to fight against the systematic erasure of the central roles Black people—as devoted practitioners and victims of the faith—have played in the making of Catholicism in the United States and wider world."

Like all history, Black Catholic History is being made today as well, and the history of earlier eras has been communicated with new urgency in the last year. Williams does that in NCR that WOC’s New Women, New Church reprinted. The edgy activism of this generation of scholars is indicated by her proposals for reparations the Church should make. She also outlines actions various institutions have taken to address the history of racism that she documents. 

Olga Segura, NCR’s opinion editor, drew me to that Williams interview in her letter to NCR Forward members this week. Segura’s own book, Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church, also moves the story forward. In my review for New Women, New Church, I emphasized the intersectionality that Segura brings to her analysis as she relates her own growth in Catholicism as well as the founding of the BLM and #MeToo movements by women, including Catholics.  

The forward to Segura’s book is by another Black Catholic woman scholar, Tia Noelle Pratt, also at Villanova. She curates the incredible resource, #BlackCatholicsSyllabus, which collects books, articles, films, documents, websites –everything– and then reorganizes it by topically, including, of course, history, but also social science research, anti-racism, theology and other fields. Last year in my November 7 blog on decolonization, I summarized a discussion between Pratt and Williams, and referred to an article by Pratt in Commonweal that showed her historically-informed sociological approach to Black liturgy and parish life. 

Which allows me to remind you that historians are not the only academics using Black history to inform their work. Just this week, stories about two meetings came across my desk: “Queer Catholic Theologians of Color” from New Ways Ministry and “Emerging from the Pandemic: Black Theologians Matter,” the Black Catholic Theology Symposium, reported in detail by Segura in NCR. New understandings come from where we’ve been; Black Catholic History Matters!