DECOLONIZING THE CHURCH
Reflections on a month of events celebrating the 30th anniversary of Black Catholic History month as part of our six-part series on “Decolonizing History”
As part of the Lepage Center’s six-part event series on “Decolonizing History,” in November we explored the theme of “Decolonizing the Church.” We began with a talk by Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt, sociologist and curator of the #BlackCatholicSyllabus. We continued with a lecture by Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University, entitled “The Real Sister Act.” She discussed her research on segregation in religious orders and the resilience of Black sisters who found various means of trying to serve God, including forming their own orders and eventually desegregating white orders. We concluded with a roundtable on “Preserving Philadelphia’s Black Catholic History and heritage in the 21st Century, featuring Adrienne Harris, a third-generation parishioner of the church and executive director of the Advocates and descendants of St. Peter Claver; Carolyn Jenkins, a religious educator, parishioner at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church and founding director of the Claver Center for Evangelization; and Jacqueline Wiggins, a longtime educator, founding member of Philadelphia’s Black Catholic Lay Caucus, and Parishioner at St. Martin de Porres.
What is Black Catholic History Month?
November marks the 30th anniversary of Black Catholic History month, established to encourage the study and amplify the histories of Black Catholics. Founded in 1990 at the meeting of National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, it came in response to Father Cyprian Davis’s book The History of Black Catholics in the United States and used November, the birth month of St. Augustine and the month of St. Martin de Porres’s Feast day, to promote Black Catholic History. With Pope Francis recently appointing Wilton Gregory as Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Washington, this year is also a landmark due to his status as the first US Black conclave voting member of the college of Cardinals, meaning Gregory will likely have a say in choosing the next pope and has the potential to become pontiff himself. In honor of Black Catholic History Month, the Lepage Center’s November events questioned what it would mean to decolonize the Church.
Around ¼ of the global Church is of African descent, as, increasingly, are its clergy members and sisters. Yet Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt introduced the idea of what she sees as a pervasive myth: that being Black and being Catholic don’t go together; that most Black Catholics are thought of as missionary converts rather than coming from a religious tradition several hundreds of years old. She works to fight this myth through her scholarship in identity studies and the #BlackCatholicSyllabus. What is the purpose of this syllabus? “To combat erasure,” Pratt explained, “If we don’t tell our own stories… others will tell our stories for us, and we’ll get left out.”
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) creates curriculum at a K-12 level for Catholic schools, and Pratt believes that currently, “There is minimal exposure of the Black Catholic experience.” Though her own syllabus is geared toward scholars, she sees no reason why children’s learning can’t be decolonized as well. “We have to stop with this notion that everything has to be about white folks,” she said, “Let’s embrace the fact that St. Augustine was an African man.”
“The African roots of the U.S. Catholic Church are just as old as the European roots,” Williams emphasized, adding that the beginning of slavery in the U.S. begins “not in 1619 but in 1565.” Her own research highlights the presence of Black Catholics in the Americas long before the formation of the United States, including enslaved people brought by the Spaniards (some by members of the Church, which was itself a corporate slaveholder) to the southern part of what is today the U.S.
How have Black Catholics been erased from history?
Despite official teachings against discrimination, in practice the Church has not consistently prohibited this in spaces of learning and worship. For example, many African Americans who felt a call to religious life faced challenges for centuries because of their skin color. Women consistently were denied admission by white sisterhoods, even by the very nuns who educated them in desegregated schools. The struggle to desegregate began in the nineteenth century, but Williams argues that most white communities “steadfastly” resisted this until the Civil Rights and Black Power era. Prior to that point, many women attempted to “pass” for white and relinquish their personal identity, or if they could not, endured verbal and sometimes physical harassment because of their skin color, sometimes being relegated to separate living quarters. “Many of these women do die young due to stress-related diseases,” Williams added.
Mother Theresa Maxis Duchemin, who could pass as white, founded the historically white Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Michigan (originally the Sisters of Providence), and when her identity was discovered, she was exiled to another religious community in Canada and erased from the records of the community she’d worked to start. Though the Sisters apologized and opened their archives in the 1990s, there are many such stories yet to be told due to instances like these.
The solution to this issue is multi-pronged. In the first place, oral histories and historical scholarship are needed. Both Williams and Pratt described Black Catholic history as a heavily under-researched field, and one with frequently inaccessible archival materials. And because the context of Black parishes being established to avoid humiliation or segregation in other religious spaces is being lost as more and more Black churches close, many parishioners are the remaining repositories of these histories. “The people who lived so much of this, you know, are now our elders, and if we don’t do this work soon, we won’t be able to hear directly from them,” Pratt warned.
How does erasure continue today?
Erasure from the historical record is not the only challenge Black Catholics face. St. Peter Claver church in Philadelphia, whose parish records for a long time obscured the contributions of prominent Black donors who helped found the parish, but which also faced physical demolition when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuttered the building in 2014.
In this case, along with the historical erasure from public record, there is the threat of erasure of a physical space, where important life events and sacraments of parishioners took place. This struggle began in 1985 when the Archdiocese began slowly withdrawing support from the parish with intent to eventually close it. Harris detailed her struggle with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to keep the church open as a sacred space or shrine. In the late 19th century, Black Catholics paid for the church out of their own donations. Parishioner Adrienne Harris noted, “The Archdiocese didn’t pay one dime for this Church,” yet it intends to sell it. St. Peter Claver is considered the “Mother Church” as the first historically Black parish in Philadelphia and the root of Black Catholicism in that city. Harris observed that “if you kill the roots, nothing will grow.”
While Carolyn Jenkins’s parish, St. Charles Borromeo, is not closing, its history and culture are being visibly erased. This erasure traces to the Archdiocese’s appointment of Father Esteban Granyak six years ago, who has instituted controversial policies like holding separate, secret masses for Neocatechumenal parishioners, selling off the parish buildings dedicated to social events, discontinuing the Parish Council, firing Black personnel, locking the Church sanctuary, and destroying the interior historic fabric of the Church when it was closed early in the pandemic. “It’s almost unbelievable to believe that the things that were happening then are happening now,” Jenkins said, “The Archdiocese which claimed to be antiracist is still allowing this to go on.”
Though St. Charles Borromeo parishioners have complained through proper channels to no avail, Jenkins’s hope is that the recent USCCB meeting in DC will produce results. “That is our church. We have been loyal to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for all these years…we feel as though that should be recognized.”
Erasing a physical space can lead directly to the erasure and underrepresentation of Black Catholic identity. Pratt argues that as many as 30% of parishioners at a historically Black parish will not seek out a new Catholic church once theirs closes. Though the USCCB currently numbers around 3 million Black Catholics in the US, she believes this number would be much higher if fallen-away Catholics were accounted for, as well as other under-represented groups including Black Latinos.
Jacqueline Wiggins shared how her own church attendance faltered once her home parish in Philadelphia, St. Elizabeth’s, closed in 1993. She cited a lack of transparency between the Archdiocese and the members of closing urban churches, saying “The planning process for these parishes was a sham,” and that the Diocese had already decided the end result without trying to support or save historically Black parishes. Wiggins eventually returned to church, after learning that an African American priest was assigned to St. Martin de Porres. She claims the experience heightened her “level of awareness about racism in the Church.”
What can we do to fight it?
In order to understand the experiences and stories of Black Catholics (particularly of those who left the Church), more personal communication as well as statistical research is necessary. Pratt believes “the onus is on us as scholars.” Her own success in in interviews comes from building trust. “I’m coming at this from a very specific set of experiences and not just a scholarly perspective.”
Williams, similarly, conducted much of her research by personally interviewing Black nuns. She happened upon the topic by chance after reading an article about the first meeting of the National Black Sisters’ Conference (NBSC) in 1968. “They begin to counter the narrative of the Church in its ambivalence toward the Black freedom struggle,” she observed, acknowledging that Black sisterhoods declined in the late twentieth century. Though this trend has since been countered with African-born nuns, Williams contends there is a lack of research into the stories of those who lived through this crucial time period.
In order to “decolonize” the Church, our panelists believe acknowledgement of past wrongs is necessary. Williams argues that “It has to come from Rome,” but cites successful examples of making amends from dioceses within the United States. In Iowa, for example, credit for founding the diocese long went to a slaveholding Bishop, who actually paid for its establishment with wages earned by an enslaved woman named Mary Louise, whom he left behind in the South and rented out. Loras College in Iowa has since named a scholarship for Marie Louise and the college’s first Black students and removed a statue of the Bishop.
Yet, decolonization does not mean the rejection of flawed individuals in the Church’s history. Some Catholic saints at various points in their lives held slaves or were in favor of segregation. Pratt doesn’t believe these people should be de-canonized and sees it as okay to “lean in” to their imperfections to understand their status as less unattainable. “We have to get more comfortable with our saints being sinners.”
To preserve the physical spaces of worship, Pratt called upon bishops to “Halt the hemorrhaging of parishes,” particularly traditionally Black parishes in cities. While she understands how changing demographics require the consolidation of churches, she urged dioceses to develop better, more transparent organizational processes, taking into account the fact that “the physical structure of a church building matters to people.”
Several panel participants explicitly called upon preservationists to help with present-day erasure of physical religious spaces, and even asked assistance from Villanova University. Harris suggested that rather than continuing a fruitless dialogue with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Villanova take over St. Peter Claver to ensure its preservation as a sacred space. “I think Villanova University would be the perfect partner for Peter Claver,” she urged, noting that it would be a “win-win situation” that would provide a space for dialogue between students and Black members of the Catholic Church, in addition to a site for religious and social community.
Regardless of whether such a partnership takes place, Villanova will certainly be focusing more on Black Catholic History in the future. In addition to holding Lepage Center events on decolonizing the Church this month, beginning next year the university will host the first annual Mother Mary Lange lecture in Black Catholic History, named for the founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first historically Black order of nuns in the US, and the first to teach in Philly and minister to the African American Community.
Resources:
· #BlackCatholicSyllabus, Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt’s comprehensive list of websites, books and articles relating to Black Catholic History
Lori Wysong is a 2020–2021 Graduate History Fellow at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
