Healing the Wounded Body, Part 2: An Honest Accounting of Catholic Sins

In the first part of this three-part essay, we considered some basic elements of a theology of reparation, a theme that is rooted in scripture, developed by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, among many others, and holds a central place in Catholic doctrine as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. At the heart of any theology of reparation lies the notion that we must act to repair the damage done by us, to initiate a process of healing the wounds we have inflicted on others and on the Body of Christ as a whole. But this requires, first, an honest accounting of our sins, a penitential rendering of the past along the lines of Augustine’s Confessions, a narrating of history within a disposition of compunction, employing, so to speak, “compunctive reasoning,” a notion associated with Anselm’s concept of atonement.[1] More will be said about this notion in the conclusion to this essay.

For now, we should establish clearly that, as affirmed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love. A Pastoral Letter Against Racism” (2018), that racism is sinful. Keeping in mind the limit of our topic to anti-Black racism by Catholics in the United States, it follows that we should review, albeit briefly, the history of racism within the Church in the United States, a history that can be divided into two periods, the era of slavery and the era after emancipation

Catholic Anti-Black Racism in the Era of Slavery

Any historical survey of anti-Black racism among Catholics in the United States must begin with slavery, and any historical survey of slavery in the United States must begin with the transatlantic slave trade. During the “Age of Discovery,” when European nations sponsored mercenaries and commercial companies to explore the lands of Africa, Asia, and America, Black Africans were abducted and transported to Europe to be sold.[2] Later, Spanish and Portuguese explorers started bringing back indigenous peoples from America—Amerindians—to be sold. In this context, the Spanish monarchy conducted debates on the rights of Amerindians and whether or not it was just to enslave them, but this issue was not taken up when it came to the rights of Black Africans.[3] In 1510, the general pattern of the slave trade shifted so that Black Africans were transported from Europe to the New World. And in 1530, it shifted again as Portuguese and Spanish sea captains started transporting African slaves directly to the New World, thus charting a truly transatlantic, east-to-west trade route. Slaves were taken from the interior of Africa overseas to America. The horrifying oceanic portion of this trip was known as “the Middle Passage.” The number of Black Africans brought to the New World in the transatlantic slave trade ballooned so that when it ended in the late nineteenth century, 11,000,000 Blacks had been kidnapped and brought to America—including 500,000 to the United States.[4]

The first Blacks in what would become the United States arrived as free Blacks or slaves in present-day Florida and California.[5] But the main geographical focal point of Catholic slaveholding became the British colony of Maryland, founded in 1634 by Cecil Calvert, Lord of Baltimore. The first Blacks in Maryland were indentured servants for the founding families and early settlers of the colony, including Jesuit priests.[6] At first, wealthy families replaced their indentured servants who had been set free with slaves, whose number in this period remained relatively low.[7] But gradually, Marylanders used more and more slaves to generate more wealth from their farms. This shift gained governmental support in the 1660s when the Maryland Assembly, under the leadership of Cecil Calvert and his son Charles, who was governor, initiated a joint agreement with the King and the City of London to bring Maryland into the lucrative transatlantic slave trade. Whereas most slaves had previously been brought from the West Indies, now they came directly from Africa.

To support this arrangement, the Assembly passed legislation defining slavery as perpetual, racially based, and hereditary. It required women who had had sexual relations with a Black slave to be enslaved themselves until their slave-husband’s death, and it locked their descendants into perpetual enslavement. It required slaveowners to have their slaves baptized but held that the baptized were not entitled to be free.[8] At length, these laws made it easier for landowners to increase their slave holdings. In 1698, ships brought 470 slaves to Maryland. Between 1700 and 1710, five ships arrived with some 300 slaves each. By 1720, slaves in Maryland numbered 12,000, twenty percent of the colonial population.[9] Over the course of the eighteenth century, the slave population grew, so that by 1810 there were 110,000 slaves, one-third of the Maryland population.[10] Thus, as it changed from a colony into a new state, Maryland also changed from a society with slaves into a slave society—a transformation made possible by Catholic individuals and families, priests and parishes, religious orders and institutions.[11]

This was clearly the case regarding the Jesuits in Maryland. Shortly after landing in 1634, the Jesuits went to work ministering to Catholics, evangelizing indigenous peoples in the area, and establishing their farms as sources of income. They started owning slaves around 1710. Due to the difficulties of farming and the usual precarities of colonial life, plus the imposition of the penal laws in 1704, the Jesuit farms struggled. But they survived, in part because they owned enough slaves to keep the farms solvent. Some slaves they purchased.[12] Others came from bequeathments of devoted Catholics; the largest gift given was by James Carroll in 1729.[13] Also, there was a “natural increase” (as it was called[14]) from having children. Thus, the Jesuits became one of the largest slaveowners in Maryland, second only to the famous Carroll family. In the eighteenth century, the numbers of slaves attached to the eight Jesuit farms rose further. Even with the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, their slaves increased. Then, in 1789, the Jesuits launched Georgetown College. After a fledgling start, it grew in size and importance. But so did the debt incurred to help it grow. To keep up with the payments, the Jesuits used income from their farms, which were dependent on slave labor. Thus, the apostolic work of the Catholic Church was deeply woven into the slave economy and culture of Maryland.

Catholic historians have celebrated this symbiotic relationship of the Catholic Church and Maryland as the prototype of a distinctively “American Catholicism,” a form of Catholicism that favored freedom of the Church from governmental interference and cooperation among different religious groups for the sake of a prosperous economy and a peaceful civic life. The amiable relations between the first Catholic archbishop in the United States, John Carroll, and the nation’s first president, George Washington, is often presented as an icon of this congenial relationship.[15] But a somber, overlooked truth about this alleged harmonious relationship between church and nation is that it was forged within an agricultural and commercial enterprise that was made possible by the enslavement of Black people.

Here, it is important to linger, however briefly, over the conditions of the slaves in Maryland. The conditions under which the slaves lived and worked were harsh, degrading, and at times lethal. Quarters in which slaves lived were substandard, cold and drafty in winter, brutally hot in the summer. Food was paltry; sometimes it was rationed, often not enough to feed people adequately. Clothes were shabby. Children went about naked. Working conditions were inhumane: long hours, strenuous work, with, of course, no formal compensation. Punishment was meted out by the lash, repeated whippings, drawing blood. Slaveowners, including Jesuits, boasted using whippings to keep their slaves in line.[16] Free travel was restricted; it was dangerous to journey off a master’s land without written permission. Naturally, these conditions led many slaves to try to escape, but it was risky. If caught or captured in a free-state and brought back, the punishment was severe. Some historians have compared them to conditions in concentration camps.[17] This comparison may not be helpful. Some slaveowners were more humane than others. Some Jesuit priests helped and befriended slaves. And there were free Blacks in Maryland throughout this period. Still, at the core of these relationships was a cold dynamic of master and slave, held in place by economic necessity and raw political power.

The unyielding power that the Jesuits held over their slaves became clear with the occurrence of two historical events: “the freedom suits” and “the sale” of the so-called Georgetown 272.[18] The freedom suits were first brought by slaves against slaveholders in the 1790s on the basis of mixed ancestry or ancestors having set foot on British soil. Both were grounds for manumission in British and colonial law. Some slaves won their suits and were set free. But by the 1830s, due to rising political tension surrounding slavery and changes in judicial standards, the suits became legally tenuous. Moreover, the Jesuits hired the best lawyers and marshaled their political connections to make sure further suits were defeated. At the same time, due to worsening finances, the Jesuits went back on their earlier promises and began to sell their slaves to pay down on Georgetown’s burgeoning debt. Initially, they sold off children. But at length, they found a sugar planter in Louisiana ready to purchase 272 of their slaves. In November 1838, they brought their slaves to docks in Alexandria, Virginia where they were loaded on ships and transported to New Orleans, where they were offloaded and taken to sugar farms in Louisiana. Years later, some slaves were mortgaged or sold to keep the sugar farms afloat. Records show them listed on inventories or bills of sale with farm equipment animals.[19] It was one of the largest private slave sales in U.S. history.[20]

The sale of the “Georgetown 272” is the most widely known event in the history of Catholics and slavery in the United States. But the Maryland Jesuits were not the only group to own slaves. There were other Jesuits, some sent from Maryland, who established slaveholding institutions in Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, and Louisiana.[21] There were also other religious communities which owned slaves: the Vincentians in Missouri; Sulpicians in their seminaries in Baltimore and Bardstown, Kentucky; Ursuline nuns in New Orleans; Carmelite nuns in Port Tobacco, Maryland; Daughters of the Cross in Louisiana; Religious of the Sacred Heart in Louisiana and Missouri; Visitation nuns in Washington, D.C.; Dominican Sisters in Kentucky; Sisters of Charity in Nazareth, Kentucky; and Sisters of Loretto likewise in Nazareth, Kentucky, who sold a slave to purchase land for their convent.[22] And there were Catholic laypeople, some who made fortunes by means of slavery, like the Carrolls of Maryland, others who owned a few slaves to operate small farms.[23] In general, Catholics in the United States practiced and supported slavery in the same way that it was practiced and supported in their surrounding society.

As the United States grew more divided over slavery in the antebellum period, the Catholic Church remained strangely united and silent—a unity and silence that was legitimated by the U.S. Catholic bishops classifying slavery as a political issue and not a moral or spiritual concern. A serious challenge to the bishops’ view of slavery as a political issue came from the Vatican when Pope Gregory XVI promulgated In Supremo Apostolatus (1839), his apostolic letter condemning the slave trade. But the letter had little impact on the Catholic bishops in the United States, thanks mainly to the efforts of Bishop John England of Charleston, whose widely read interpretation of the letter shaped the bishops’ response to it.

In his diocesan periodical, Bishop England advanced three arguments about the apostolic letter: (1) that Pope Gregory XVI distinguished between “the slave-trade” which he condemned and “domestic slavery” on which he did not make a moral judgment; (2) that domestic slavery is not in itself (in se) evil; and (3) that the natural law does not prohibit nor sanction slavery because it depends on how it is practiced.[24] This argument, with its slave trade/domestic slavery distinction, became the intellectual construct enabling the U.S. Catholic bishops to ignore or set aside the apostolic letter. Not surprisingly, leading abolitionists sharply criticized the bishops on this score. For example, Daniel O’Connell, the Irish political leader, argued that slave sales within the United States, such as the Jesuits’ sale, did in fact constitute slave trading and thus fell under the papal prohibition.[25] Others pointed to dozens of countries that had already outlawed slavery. But these abolitionist critiques were blunted in the minds of the bishops because they were often imbued with anti-Catholic invective.[26] In some respects, the bishops’ views on slavery were not so much pro-slavery as anti-abolitionist.[27] In any case, the bishops remained neutral on slavery so as to steer clear of politics. There was only one exception, Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati, but he stated his anti-slavery views relatively late, in the summer of 1862, after the Civil War was underway.[28] Thus, it was that the Catholic bishops, and Catholics in general, failed to distinguish themselves when it came to the morality of slavery.

Multiple factors went into the Church’s silence on slavery: its complicated teaching on slavery; its rejection of secular abolitionism; its minority status in the United States; its growing immigrant identity, and so on. All these factors have bearing on judging whether or not, or to what extent, the Church failed by not condemning slavery’s mission or providing pastoral care to its Black members. This judgment is pertinent to the nature of any process of reparation, which is addressed in part three of this essay (on practices of reparation). For now, I want to continue this penitential history by sketching anti-Black racism in the U.S. Catholic Church after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Catholic Anti-Black Racism in the Post-Emancipation Era

Three years after the emancipation of slaves, with the Civil War having just ended, the Catholic bishops of the United States gathered in Baltimore for their Plenary Council of 1866. In a follow-up decree, they offered an unenthusiastic response to the emancipation of slaves: “We could have wished that . . . a more gradual system of emancipation could have been adopted, so that they might have been in some measure prepared to make a better use of their freedom, than they are likely to do now.” Here we see the pernicious assumption that Blacks lack a capacity for self-governance being used to justify a call for gradual change when it comes to justice for Blacks. This call for gradualism—what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a century later “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”[29]—would be repeated many times in the next hundred years, both in U.S. society and in the Catholic Church.

Certain bishops wanted more from the Plenary Council of 1866, most notably Martin J. Spalding, the Archbishop of Baltimore, who called for a national program to raise funds for missionaries to evangelize former slaves. Ahead of the meeting, he wrote to a fellow prelate that freeing the slaves provided “a golden opportunity for reaping a harvest of souls . . . .”[30] But the Council rejected Spalding’s proposal of a nationally coordinated effort. As a result, Catholic ministry to Blacks proceeded only in a piecemeal way, with the bishops in Savannah, St. Augustine, and Baltimore recruiting religious orders (such as the Sisters of St. Joseph and Benedictine monks) to minster to Blacks in their dioceses.[31] Moreover, some religious orders started pastoral work among Blacks in the West and the South: Jesuits in Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri; Spiritans in Kentucky and Arkansas; and Josephites in Louisiana, among others.

But all the while, there was resistance to the Church ministering to Blacks, and not only in the South where it might be expected, but also in the East where Church resources were stretched by the need to provide pastoral care to European immigrants. Rome weighed in on this matter as the bishops met for the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore of 1884. They were instructed by the Vatican to upgrade their ministry to Blacks. In response, the bishops established an annual collection “for Indians and Negroes.” Nothing more. As a result, Spalding’s “glorious harvest” collapsed into a “lost harvest.”[32] The Church’s record of evangelizing Blacks in the decades after the Civil War was, in the understated words of Cyprian Davis, “not a very glorious one.”[33]

The key obstacle to making inroads in ministering to Blacks was the dearth of Black priests. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, there was less than a handful. There were the three Healy brothers, James, Alexander, and Patrick, born to a plantation owner in Georgia and a mulatto slave woman and educated in seminaries in Canada or Europe; each of them made remarkable contributions to the Church.[34] And there was Augustus Tolton who was born a slave in Missouri, went to seminary in Rome (seminaries in the United States refused him), ordained in Rome in 1886, and served in the Diocese of Alton (Illinois) and later in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Unlike the Healys, Tolton faced stiff obstacles owing to his race.[35] To gain more Black priests, better recruitment of candidates was needed. This task was taken up by the Josephites. Led by a dynamic superior general, John Slattery, who was supported by two influential bishops, John Ireland and John J. Keane, the Josephites founded a preparatory seminary, a major seminary, and ordained three Black men: Charles Randolph Uncles in 1891, John Henry Dorsey in 1902, and John J. Plantevigne in 1907. This vision of producing Black priests to minister to Black Catholics was a powerful one, but the opposition to it was equally powerful. At times, it was overt. But more often it came in subtle ways, such as seminary applications refused because of a lack of “qualifications” or “unfavorable social conditions.”[36]

The experience of Fr. Plantevigne was particularly tragic. Born and raised in Louisiana, he worked on a Josephite parish mission band and completed many successful tours in the South. But when the mission band headed to Louisiana, he was refused permission to preach by the bishop of New Orleans. Plantevigne insisted that this would disaffect the Black Catholics in the diocese and give aid and comfort to the Church’s critics, but the bishop still refused because “the time was not right.” Two years after this incident, in a public speech, Plantevigne warned about ignoring the pastoral needs of Black Catholics. “The blood of the Negro boils in resentment of a ‘Jim Crow’ system in the Catholic Church . . . . This is unfortunate because it loses the Negro and fails to develop true religion among the whites, for true religion is charity.” Eventually, he suffered a nervous breakdown and died at an early age, with his vision of welcoming Blacks into the Catholic fold unrealized.[37]

The “Jim Crow” system in the Catholic Church that Plantevigne decried existed in various settings in the twentieth century. In parishes, especially in the South, Blacks were forced to sit in the back pews or the balcony and to go forward for communion only after whites had received. They were also directed in many dioceses to parishes meant solely for Blacks, as suggested in the book title “Jim Crow Comes to Church,” which tracks segregation in parishes in Louisiana.[38] Segregation ruled in parishes in the North too, where parish boundaries often conformed to White boundaries in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston. Racial tension erupted sharply when these parish neighborhoods were transformed by the Great Migration, eventually setting off a migration of whites to the suburbs.[39] What could be called “Color-Line Catholicism” permeated other institutions as well. Men’s and women’s religious orders comprised of white members had subtle but effective policies for keeping Blacks out.[40] The same was true of some Catholic charities, hospitals, and orphanages, which signaled to clients the message: “Whites Only.” Catholic colleges and universities maintained certain barely stated but clear segregationist admissions policies. Reinforcing these Catholic forms of segregation was a rhetoric that demeaned Black habits and culture, comparing Blacks to animals, or identifying them as descendants of Canaan, son of Ham, who was condemned by Noah to perpetual slavery (Gen 9:24-25). Based on pernicious folklore and pseudo-religious mythology, this rhetoric permeated White Catholic groups and bolstered the anti-Black racism in U.S. culture at large.

There were, of course, those in the Catholic Church in the United States who did not conform to this ecclesial segregation and racist culture. There were orders of nuns who worked with Blacks, some with a history going back to colonial times. There were priests like John LaFarge, S.J., who mentored clergy and laity working to improve interracial relations, including Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., Fr. John Egan of Chicago, Clare Booth Luce, and others.[41] There were prelates like Archbishop Joseph Ritter of St. Louis and Archbishop George Rummel of New Orleans who denounced segregation and worked to integrate Catholic schools.[42] And then, there were the Catholic clergy and laity who, in the 1960s and 1970s, joined with Blacks in their struggle for Civil Rights, and devoted their lives to working for racial justice for Blacks in civil society and in the Church.[43] All these episodes must be included in a full and fair account of anti-Black racism in the Catholic Church in the United States. And yet, each of these episodes and indeed the entire shift in the Church in favor of integration was met with resistance and opposition on the part of some Catholics. Indeed, in the struggle against racism in church and society, Catholics themselves remained by and large divided. For this reason, in the words of historian John McGreevy, “acts of contrition are necessary.”[44]

All of which is to say we need a penitential history, one that focuses on our past sins of anti-Black racism so that we may repent of them—a history not unlike the Deuteronomic histories of the Old Testament, and not unlike the confessional history displayed in Augustine’s Confessions, in which the very act of recounting the sins that have led us away from God instills in us the humility that leads us back to God. At the outset of this essay, we brought up the notion of “compunctive reasoning,” whereby Anselm’s conception of the atonement is guided by a sense that humanity’s sin has disrupted by the order of justice and it can only be properly reordered in a spirit of both lowliness at the knowledge of our sins and yet of hope in the infinite mercy of God. It is this compunctive reasoning that can bring Catholics in the United States to grasp the ugly truth about our past and lead us along the path of repentance and reparation.

Conclusion

One especially beguiling truth about the painful history of racism in the Catholic Church sketched out above is that it has not been unknown. It has been documented and narrated by prominent Catholic scholars in the United States for the past century (Peter Guilday, John Tracy Ellis, Jay Dolan, David O’Brien, and others), but without fully conveying what really happened because so many voices from the past were muted and marginalized. Fortunately, in recent years, the necessary corrective of putting this history of racism at the center of the story is being carried out by historians and theologians, many of whom, not coincidentally, are Black Catholics.

If it were not for their work and their perspective, we would not know of “a Church in chains,” as Cyprian Davis calls it, nor of “Christ’s image in Black.”[45] Nor would we know, as Al Raboteau has explained to us, that for Black Catholics and Christians coming to our country, the United States was not the New Israel but the new Egypt.[46] We would not be disturbed into “Knowing Christ Crucified,” in the words of Shawn Copeland, and we would not be aware, as Shannen Dee Williams puts it, of the difficulty in “bearing witness to a silenced past.”[47] Without the reporting of Rachel Swarns, too many Catholics would still remain aloof to lives and times, the sufferings and the tears, of “the 272” and of their ancestors and descendants. The lesson we can draw from this truth is that Catholics need to hear Black Catholic voices, and need to read and absorb Black Catholic histories, in order to understand our need to make reparation. Indeed, reading such histories can itself be a practice of reparation, but only if it leads to further practices of reparation.

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Tags: Accounting Body Catholic Healing Honest Part Sins Wounded