Women Priests, Black History

This is about the beauty and boldness of Eucharistic communities.  On the margins of the institutional church, my experience has been that women priests are more courageous and more willing to infuse their liturgies with issues of social and racial justice.  

Not to say that male priests in Eucharistic communities don’t, but in my experience, they tend to engage more with the lectionary. And it’s not that the many lay members of these small faith communities don’t exercise creativity sensitivity when they make liturgies. It’s not that priests in the institutional church don’t address social issues, though from what I hear they don’t do it all that much. 

These thoughts occurred to me because two women priests made Black history central to the liturgies they planned last Sunday: Judy Heffernan of the Community of the Christian Spirit (CCS) on Zoom and Kathy Gibbons Schuck of the Community of St. Mary Magdalene at Cambridge in Moorestown NJ, the latter in a chapel in a nursing home. I have no way of knowing how representative these women priests are, but I want to share with you some of what they included in their celebrations. I only regret that I’m not going to share the rich “dialogue homilies” that followed, but I expect you will generate your own ideas, and the joy I feel every week sharing with my Zoom community.  

One reading for CCS was adapted from “Catholics Cannot be Innocent Bystanders to Racism,” an article in NCR quoting a talk by Sr. Patricia Chappel:

Working for peace and justice is a difficult road to walk. We must listen to those who have experienced violence and institutional failures. We must listen and not refute, debate or negate others’ lived experience. There may be times when you may say Amen and other times you may say Ouch!

Catholics must address the systems in our country and our church that have kept injustice, racism and hatred alive, then work to replace them with Gospel values and Catholic social teaching.

 We are called in our own moment of history to live and proclaim the truth that regardless of race, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, religion or economic status, all are worthy of respect.

This had particular resonance in Catholic Philadelphia last Sunday. The week before, a racist video by students from St. Hubert’s High School for Girls circulated widely on social media. Within days, parents of Black students who had left that school because of inaction on racial harassment and bullying had organized a protest. School leaders and the Archdiocese condemned the crude video, announced that the girls “are no longer members of the school community,” and involved the Anti-Defamation League, the Office for Black Catholics and the Archdiocesan Commission on Racial Healing to provide “restorative resources.”

Students at this school are 80% white and a little more than 6% Black. My guess is that J.W. Hallahan, the first all-girls diocesan Catholic high school in the U.S., had a more even racial balance, based on the photos of the last graduating class; it was closed by the Archdiocesan School Board two years ago. An object lesson in structural racism? 

Those at both liturgies discussed St. Hubert’s. At the St. Mary Mag liturgy, Kathy asked in the homily: 

The pattern is insidious! It’s not simply individual bigotry – it’s systemic, generational, and unsettling. Not just in our schools: Public, private, parochial, urban, suburban, rural, integrated or not, racism remains. Not just with our youth. What have we taught them? 

What we do next is our choice: 1) be irritated, outraged, or violent, 2) deny the issue touches us or walk away; or choose the third way 3) openly engaging the questions with ‘the others’ to begin undoing the knots or wounds of racism that live in us, especially those of us who are white.

She concluded, “It seems to me Jesus was clear in laying out the blueprint of nonviolent resistance: Love fully and wholeheartedly, with integrity, just as your God loves with integrity.” This is the last line of the Gospel as translated by the Comprehensive Catholic Lectionary (which is available for free download at www.womensordination.org), more usually read as “Therefore, be perfect, as Abba God in heaven is perfect.” 

Befitting the approaching Valentine’s Day, both liturgies focused on love. Both joined hymns from Catholic sources by “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in person and “We Shall Overcome” on Zoom. Both memorialized Louise Calloway, the beloved founder of the Burlington County Underground Railroad Museum in New Jersey, who had died that week. 

Both prayed for healing. Kathy’s litany remembered Black leaders, some well-known nationally like Harriet Tubman, William Still, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Blessed be their names.

I was especially pleased that Kathy included Black leaders that may be better-known in Philadelphia. “We remember the daughters of abolitionists Charlotte and James Forten: Margaretta Forten, Harriet Forten Purvis, and Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis, who with their mother co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and Harriet Forten Purvis and her husband, Robert Purvis, and all the conductors on the Underground Railroad who transported more than 100,000 people north to freedom.” Blessed be their names.

Long ago, those Forten sisters inspired me; in graduate school I wrote a paper on their work conducting Freedmen’s Schools in the Sea Islands of South Carolina in the years immediately after the Civil War. The Museum of the American Revolution has just opened a special exhibit about this family. You can see it until Thanksgiving. I always want to remember, when racist Philadelphia erupts again, that we have such a rich history of Black leadership that should never get obscured in the rush to celebrate white heroes. 

Finally, the whole reason for this blog is to share the reading Judy asked me to do. Let us ponder her selections in our search for healing: 

Black History Week was created in the 1920s by historian Carter Woodson. Gerald Ford expanded this to Black History Month to honor the too often neglected accomplishments of people of color in every area of endeavor throughout history. Let us give thanks for our teachers and guides.

Ola Joseph: Diversity is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another’s uniqueness.

Angela Davis: I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am working to change the things I cannot accept.

Audre Lord: When I dare to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Shirley Chisholm: If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

Ijeoma Oluo: Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.