Healing the Wounded Body, Part 3: Ecclesial Practices of Making Reparation

Ecclesial Practices of Making Reparation

In the first part of this three-part essay, we reviewed the rudiments of a Catholic theology of reparation. In the second part, we sketched out a history of anti-Black racism in the Catholic Church in the United States aiming at an honest accounting of our past. Now we turn to the practice of making reparation for these sins.

The need for reparation can be put in the form of a syllogism: (1) if, as the Catechism and our tradition teaches, making reparation is a constitutive part of repenting from sin; (2) and if, as history shows, the Catholic Church in the United States has been guilty of the sins of anti-Black racism; (3) then the Catholic Church in the United States should make reparation for its sin(s) of anti-Black racism. The simple logic of this syllogism provides a rationale for reparation, but it does not get to the heart of the matter because reparation for racism is also a matter of the heart.

Recent Papal Statements

Far better it is to approach the matter of reparation for the sins of racism as Pope Leo XIV did in his recent encyclical on AI. In the context of considering the possible enslavement of humanity in the shackles of artificial intelligence, the pope paused to comment on the Church’s dilatory and ambivalent response to slavery in the past. Although the matter was complicated by the development of doctrine concerning slavery, it still took a long time, too long, he implies, for the Church to see that the truth of the dignity of the human person, created in the image of God, is incompatible with slavery and warrants its condemnation:

This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon (Magnifica Humanitas §176).

The statement is carefully crafted, appropriately nuanced, but it is also written straight from the heart.

Making reparation is a practice straight from the heart. As Pope Francis wrote in Dilexit Nos, the human and divine love emanating from the Sacred Heart of Jesus moves us at the center of our being, draws us into returning love for love, produces in us words and actions of love, and inspires us to offer reparation for our sins and the sins of all humanity. This movement of the heart is no purely individual exchange. Rather it is a profoundly social reality, the significance of which reverberates throughout society. “In union with Christ,” Francis writes, “amid the ruins we have left in this world by our sins, we are called to build a new civilization of love. That is what it means to make reparation as the heart of Christ would have us do. Amid the devastation wrought by evil, the heart of Christ desires that we cooperate with him in restoring goodness and beauty to our world” (Dilexit Nos §182). This work overcomes social alienation and reorients the sinful structures of society through “acts of love, service, and reconciliation,” constituting what Francis calls “evangelical reparation” (Dilexit Nos §183). This mode of reparation is born out of a compunction of heart and issues in genuine solidarity (Dilexit Nos §190).

This vision of evangelical reparation was surely in the mind and the heart of Pope Saint John Paul II when he publicly apologized multiple times for the Church’s sins concerning the practice of slavery. He offered one such apology in 1992 while standing on the island of Gorée, an historic site of the French slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “From this African sanctuary of Black pain,” he reflected, “we implore heaven’s forgiveness. These men, women, and children were victims of a shameful trade, in which people who were baptized, but not living their faith, took part.”[1] Two years later, writing out of a similar penitential posture, in the encyclical Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul II called on the Church to embark upon a process of purification of memory and repentance as a way to mark the coming of the third millennium. He pointed to “past errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency, and slowness to act,” focusing on the Church’s role in creating and deepening division among Christians, even employing violence in the (supposed) service of truth and the gospel, and acquiescing to the rule of totalitarian regimes and their oppression of peoples, especially Jews in the holocaust (Tertio Millennio Adveniente §§33-36). This unprecedented acknowledgment of the Church’s past sins was followed up by a report by the International Theological Commission called Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (1999). It called for continuing along this penitential path with confidence in the healing power of God’s mercy.

All of these relatively recent developments—the words and witness of John Paul II, the study by the International Theological Commission, the heartfelt teaching of Pope Francis, and the remarkably clear statement of Pope Leo XIV on slavery—combine to deliver an invitation, indeed a mandate, to make reparations for the sins of anti-Black racism on the part of Catholics in the United States.

Reckoning with the Past

This invitation, of course, has already been received and acted upon by Catholics in the United States. The most notable instance has been at Georgetown University, where efforts along these lines sprang into public view in 2015. The occasion was the refurbishing of Mulledy Hall, named after Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J., president of Georgetown who carried out the notorious sale of 272 enslaved people in 1838. To study and reflect on the implications of that episode within the context and overall history of the institution, the president, John J. DiGiola, formed a Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to present the findings of historical research and recommend how to acknowledge the past. This effort was also spurred by dramatic developments on the national scene: the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014, the killing of worshippers at an AME Church in South Carolina, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Moreover, other universities, some of the oldest and most esteemed in the country, had been dealing with their entanglement with slavery. These developments created a fraught context within which the Working Group on Slavery went about its task. There were missteps and missed opportunities, especially concerning a lack of involvement of the descendants of the slaves sold in 1838 in the early phases of the project. Still, the effort was and is commendable. If the Jesuits in Maryland and at Georgetown had committed such egregious sins, then at least they and their coworkers at Georgetown were now attempting some kind of reconciliation. All this is well documented and narrated in an excellent book, Facing Georgetown’s History.[2]

The efforts at Georgetown to reckon with its own history of slavery suggest a three-part framework by which we can identity steps in the process of reckoning with the history of the U.S. Catholic Church in general: (1) documentation and narration, (2) conversation and disputation, (3) reparation and reconciliation. Let us take each of these in turn.

Documentation and Narration

One remarkable subsection in Facing Georgetown’s History is titled “Documents.” The first document is a deed dated January 30, 1717, the earliest record of slaveholding by the Maryland Jesuits. It lists a transferal of various goods: liturgical supplies (chalices, candlesticks, vestments, corporals, and purificators); household items (furniture, tools, trunks, bottles, jugs, and linens); livestock (bulls, cows, calves, horses, hogs); and “Negro Servants 15—4 men, Will, Jack, Kitt, Peter. 4 Women, Mary, Teresa, Clare, Peggy. 4 Boyes, Jack, Clement, Tomm, James, 3 Girles, Betty, Cate, Susan [sic].” These fifteen “Negro Servants” (i.e., enslaved folk) are listed along with livestock and furniture as property. The difference is that they have names.[3]

Another document is a sermon from 1749 on the treatment of slaves: “Charity to Negroes is Due from all particularly their masters [sic].”[4] Another is a published advertisement offering $ 30 for a runaway slave from “Georgetown College . . . named ISAAC, about 23 years old quite black complexion.”[5] Another is a letter from a Jesuit Brother Joseph Moberly to Fr. John Grassi, president of Georgetown, explaining that slavery does not pay financially, due to costs for food, clothes, medical expenses, and wood (for heating).[6] Another is the baptismal record, dated 1819, of Sylvester Greenleaf of Newtown plantation.[7] Another is a sermon from 1835 criticizing abolitionists for sewing discord and disorder in the nation, whereas “God is a God of order—his religion secures order, and the ministry of that religion should be ministers of order.”[8] Another is the bill of the sale that was carried out in 1838, listing the names of those to be sold, including Sylvester Greenleaf.[9] And these people’s fate in Louisianna is traced in several other documents: a bill of sale (1843), a report (1848), and a contract (1865, the year of emancipation) between the former slaves, now sharecroppers, of Iberville Parish and their former slaveholder.[10]

What is striking about these documents is that they help us to face Georgetown’s history of slavery in such graphic detail. It is poignant to read the names and even more so to read them in deeds and bills of sale. These people made in the image of God. Documenting the history of slavery and segregation helps generate empathy for the people on whom such indignities were inflicted. These people were, and are, members of the Body of Christ.

Much the same warped reality was conveyed by Cyprian Davis in his book The History of Black Catholics in the United States. Early periods in that history are based on baptismal, burial, and marriage records in cities such as St. Agustine in Florida; Natchitoches in Louisiana; Mobile, Savannah, and Baltimore.[11] Other historians have been following Davis’s lead. Emilie Gagnet Leumas has written about the “uncomfortable entries” found in the sacramental records of enslaved and free persons of color. Records of this kind, she notes, can be found in many dioceses, Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, among others. They were often kept meticulously. But they are “uncomfortable entries” in that they show the importance in the Church in providing pastoral care while also showing that the care was being provided to slaves.[12] For many years, in some cases for several centuries, these records remained out of sight, as if placed in a box in an attic, tucked away, like a disturbing, potentially disruptive family secret. But now they are being opened up, studied, and publicized.

An organization dedicated to this specific purpose is the Catholic Religious Organizations Studying Slavery (CROSS). Founded in 2021 by representatives of the Archdiocese of St. Louis and of the Jesuit Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project (located in St. Louis), CROSS includes representatives from eight dioceses and six religious organizations. Its stated mission is “to promote engagement and understanding of Catholic slaveholding and restorative justice.” Toward that end it holds bi-annual conferences. The theme of the first conference in 2023 was “Open Wide Our Archives: Truth, Transparency, and Access”—a play on the title of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter of 2018, “Open Wide Our Hearts.” The point was that the Church cannot claim to have open arms for Black Catholics without making available the documents of the past. The second conference, held at Georgetown in 2025, continued this theme by showcasing “a series of projects from across the country, in archives, education, and archeology that are working to uncover the past and make this information available.” The third conference will continue this work while also focusing on the voices and perspectives of the descendants of the enslaved. But the task of CROSS is not only archival, not only given to making documents available, getting the historical record straight, and publishing the results. In the words of a call for proposals for the third conference: “In his first encyclical letter, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged and apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in both the slave trade and chattel slavery. We must continue to seek a full understanding of these sins of the Catholic Church and bring them to light. It is only in the light of the Holy Spirit that the Church can atone for its sins.” In other words, the task of CROSS is also to tell a story, a theological and ecclesial story, a story of the Catholic Church’s sins of slavery and the power of Christ’s atonement and redemption, made possible through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The same can be said for the Church’s sins after slavery, in the post-Emancipation period. By no means did anti-Black racism cease after 1865 (as we have seen in part 2 of this essay). The exclusion and discrimination within the clergy; the segregated parishes fixed by diocesan policy; segregated seating in churches; religious orders refusing entry to Black candidates; bishops and religious superiors blocking those under their charge from participating in civil rights activism; the paucity of Black bishops; the relative paucity of Black clergy and religious; and the hundreds of ways in words and actions, purposeful or unintentional, that non-Black Catholics of all stripes, on all levels, in all parts of the country, made it clear to Black Catholics that they were second class members of the Church—all these developments led the National Black Caucus in 1968 to declare that the Catholic Church in the United States is a “white racist institution.” Many of these stories have already been told by Cyprian Davis, Stephen Ochs, Shannen Dee Williams, and many others.[13] We need to continue adding to these stories and clarifying what they mean.

Conversation and Disputation

The most significant fruit of the Georgetown Working Group on slavery and CROSS is that the stories they have told have opened space for more stories to be told, especially the stories of the descendants of the enslaved. After Rachel Swarns published her account of the slave sale in 1838, descendants of the GU-238 contacted The New York Times to gather more information and connect it with what they already knew of their own family history.[14] Gaps in the stories of prior generations were filled. Puzzles of the past were solved. And descendants gained a voice in charting the next steps in the process, taking as their motto, “nothing about us, without us.”[15] As these stories of the enslaved multiply and reverberate through our communities, a collective story is emerging: a story of people taken off the Jesuit farms of Maryland, loaded on to ships in Virginia, brought by ship to New Orleans, and marched to the sugar plantations south and west of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while some Jesuits in Maryland fretted that the slaves being sold would lose their faith, and yet the enslaved kept their faith. That is the poignant and powerful part of the story. They prayed their rosaries, married in the Church (when they could), had their children baptized, and are buried in Catholic cemeteries—and kept the faith through it all, in spite of it all, and passed that faith on to their descendants, a faith in a God who lifts up the lowly and scatters the proud in their conceit.[16]

As we in the Church continue to engage in conversations on these stories, we will also be obliged to address the inevitable questions that arise in relation to making reparation. After all, the practice of reparation implies that Catholic slaveowners, by the mere fact that they owned slaves, were committing sin. But did the Catholic Church at that time consider slavery to be a sin? As we have seen in part 2 of this essay, the Catholic bishops in the United States remained relatively silent on the matter of slavery. The esteemed historian of American Catholicism John Tracy Ellis credits them with preserving the unity of the Catholic Church at a time when many Protestant denominations were dividing over slavery.[17] And moral theologian Joseph Capizzi has argued that there were understandable doctrinal and contextual reasons why the Catholic bishops did not condemn slavery. For one thing, natural law reasoning at the time permitted certain forms of slavery; it was not regarded as an intrinsic evil. For another thing, the papal condemnation in 1839 was limited to the slave trade and did not extend to domestic slavery in the United States. For another, because abolitionists in the United States exhibited such a staunch anti-Catholicism in taking their stand, the bishops recoiled from making common cause with them. And there were other mitigating factors as well, in particular, the bishops’ prudent decision to stay out of politics lest a backlash arise against the immigrant Church. To be sure, Capizzi holds that the U.S. Catholic bishops should have condemned specific practices of slavery, but he maintains that it is anachronistic simply to condemn their silence wholesale.[18] This is an important, well nuanced argument. But there are counterpoints to be made. For example, Catholics had already argued that natural law prohibited enslaving the Amerindians. Why did it not prohibit the enslavement of Blacks from Africa? Also, people at the time contended that the distinction between the slave trade and domestic slavery was a false one. After all, why was the infamous sale of the GU-278 not an instance of (interstate) slave trade? Moreover, the prudential judgment of the U.S. Catholic bishops to steer clear of politics can be regarded as an instance of false prudence, while morally condemning slavery might have been an instance of genuine prudence, indeed infused prudence, as described by Aquinas.

My point is that these are complex arguments that need to be hashed out in a sustained, discipline way, in the manner of the great disputations conducted by Spanish scholastics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries concerning the rights of Amerindians.[19] In this case, debate can become a means of addressing unanswered questions and gaining insight on important issues that remain unsettled. Moreover, paradoxically, vigorous debate can itself be a sign of unity, a sharing of fundamental assumptions. The practice of disputation forestalls a descent into a mere cacophony of individual opinions and reinforces shared conceptions of the good.[20]

The same manner of conversation and disputation (to use the classical scholastic term) is needed to clarify the meaning and significance of anti-Black racism on the part of Catholics in the post- emancipation period. If, as suggested above, the Catholic Church can aptly be described as racist, there remain a host of questions to ask for the sake of clarification and disputation, such as: What should the Church have done about segregation as it took hold in the South? Should the Catholic bishops in Southern states have opposed the Jim Crow Laws? If so, on what grounds? And what political strategy should have been used? Should Catholic bishops in the United States have taken a stronger, more uniform, and earlier stance against segregation in Catholic schools? Should they have done so regarding Catholic colleges and universities? And Catholic hospitals and charitable institutions? What is it that rendered Catholics in the past blind to the hubris and injustice of racism in the Church and in society? Historical accounts of the Jesuits of Maryland and Georgetown owning slaves have been published for more than a century; it was spelled out in detail by Robert Emmett Curran, S.J. in 1983 and again by Cyprian Davis in 1990.[21] Why is it that only now a movement toward reparation is more broadly taking hold among Catholics in the United States? What is it that other Catholics have failed to see and understand about their fellow Black members of the Body of Christ? Should we confess our slowness to see and understand our brothers and sisters? Should we repent for it? Atone for it? Make reparation for it?

Needless to say, this is a tendentious line of questioning that returns us to the first part of this three-part essay on a theology of reparation. To the last question, I answer yes. We in the Church are called to make reparation for many sins of the near and distant past. Masses of reparation are offered when someone commits a sacrilege at an altar, or for clerical sexual abuse of children. The sin of anti-Black racism is not fundamentally different. The Church should make reparation for it.

Reparation and Reconciliation

But what forms should reparations take?

People immediately people think in monetary terms, making restitution for the theft of labor, goods, and inherited wealth. With good reason, for as Aristotle and Aquinas noted, and as repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an essential part of repentance for sins is a readiness, when possible and in a proportionate manner, to make restitution. It rings true to our standards of justice. Ta-Nehesi Coates makes a cogent argument along these lines case in his influential article, “The Case for Reparations.” But a key consideration has to do with the proper jurisdiction for adjudicating these claims. In cases of the of material goods, reparations are adjudicated by the secular courts, which Coates assumes in his argument. And the secular courts can and do impose penalties on the Church, as in sexual abuse cases. But the Church also makes reparations on its own without the imposition of civil law.

An analogy can help clarify this distinction. It is well known that Major League Baseball was for many years racist. Blacks were not allowed to play. When they did finally play, they were treated unjustly: lower salaries, shunned by other players, harassed by fans, forced to patronize segregated hotels and restaurants, and so on. Now if a Black player seeks compensation for unpaid wages, he can seek a remedy through the civil courts on the basis of law. But Major League Baseball is still free to offer on its own, voluntarily, reparations for past injustices, wage compensations, or perhaps baseball programs for underprivileged youths, college scholarships to outstanding Black players, or educational programs on the struggles of Black players breaking into the big leagues, and any number of other forms of compensation. The Church can be seen as a free association like Major League Baseball. The Church is answerable to the law in reparation cases, but at the same time, it can make reparation on its own volition, on the basis of its own beliefs, in and through its own practices, customs, and traditions. And it should.

A good example of making reparation is the effort that has been made at Georgetown: a fund to support descendants of the enslaved drawn from student fees or donor contributions, classes on the story of the GU-278, conferences featuring stories of descendants, masses of reconciliation. Similar efforts have been initiated by other institutions founded by Jesuits and by other religious orders. Comparable efforts at reparation are occurring at numerous dioceses, New Orleans, St. Louis, Louisville, and several others. At Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery up river from Charleston, South Carolina, the monks have erected a meditation garden honoring the enslaved people who lived and worked on the property for a previous owner when it was a rice plantation. Its purpose is to foster truth and reconciliation and healing.

A remarkable reparation effort is underway at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Maryland. The parish is located near the former White Marsh Plantation that was owned and operated by the Jesuits in the 1700s. In 2022, a few burial markers were discovered at the edge of the parish cemetery. It turned out to be the graves of enslaved people. Researchers have subsequently discovered more graves, some 2,200 all told (so far). And the parish has established a Cemetery Restoration Project. A few months after the graves were discovered, a blessing ceremony was conducted to commemorate the lives of the enslaved in its midst. It was publicized as a “Prayer Service to Bless a Portion of the Parish Cemetery for African-Americans Buried There.” Wilton Gregory, the cardinal archbishop of Washington, led the ceremony. The archdiocesan newspaper reported that “it was attended by members of the parish and community, as well as descendants of the area’s enslaved. Descendants wore small black ribbons pinned to their coats that read ‘forever in our hearts.’”

This message gets to the heart of the matter. We make reparation because it is, as Pope Francis taught, “an extension of the heart of Christ” (Dilexit nos § 191). The “wound in Christian memory” to which Pope Leo referred can bring us together. The practice of reparation is fundamentally a uniting of our hearts with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose heart is also united with the enslaved buried on the grounds of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. And with those buried on the sugar plantations of Louisiana. And their descendants. And the Black Catholics who labored without pay in Catholic rectories, religious houses, and convents; who had to sit in the balcony for Mass on sweltering Sunday mornings and had to wait to kneel at the communion rail until the White folks had received. Our hearts are united in and through the Sacred Heart of Jesus Who invites all of us, slave and free, Black and White, saint and sinner, living and dead, first and last, all humanity, into a rumbling throng processing along the way to eternity.

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