The True Truth: Sr. Thea Bowman, the Testifying Evangelist
When Sister Thea Bowman addressed the United States Catholic bishops on June 17, 1989, she had long been what she called a “fully functioning” Black Catholic—so much so that the Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration was able to speak the truth her conscience urged to the bishops with heartfelt love. Her remarks on what it means to be Black in the Catholic Church challenged, convicted, and inspired them. “I bring myself; my black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become,” she said, defining “fully functioning.” “I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African-American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility—as gifts to the Church.”
She was an evangelist, singing and preaching the “true truth”—saying what needed to be said—to the U.S. Church hierarchy at their spring meeting. Seated in a wheelchair, her body riddled with cancer, she made her profound observations with urgency. In a colorful African dress, often flashing her bright smile, exuding joy, she was the spirituals-singing, whole-truth testifying “conscience of the Church.”
Describing that gathering held at Seton Hall University in East Orange, New Jersey, biographer Maurice J. Nutt writes: “Even in her sickness and fragility [she] delivered an unforgettable, well-crafted, and—in her typical Thea folksy fashion—spontaneous message on the struggle for racial justice and the need for evangelization, Catholic education, and full participation and inclusivity for black Catholics in the Roman Catholic Church in America. In a word, Thea was masterful.”
The charismatic sister, who was an educator, scholar, vocalist, intercultural awareness advocate, and the great-granddaughter of former slaves, was such a popular evangelist that she had been featured on the television news magazine 60 Minutes two years prior. On the day of her meeting with the bishops, they were visibly moved, some shedding tears, at her powerfully delivered message. At the end, she got them to cross their arms and hold hands with one another while singing the hymn that had become the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Nine months later, on March 30, 1990, Sister Thea died. She was fifty-two.
She was given the name Bertha Elizabeth Bowman when she was born on December 29, 1937, in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her parents, Theon and Mary Esther Coleman Bowman, gave their only child a middle-class upbringing in nearby Canton, Mississippi. Theon was a doctor and Mary Esther was a teacher. Sister Thea often referred to herself as an “old folks’” child because her parents were middle-aged when she was born.
Despite being well-loved and intelligent ,while in grade school, due to the inferior education given in underfunded Black schools in the then-segregated South, Bertha was behind in reading. When Catholic priests and nuns opened a mission school for Black children in Canton, the Bowmans enrolled their daughter in Holy Child Jesus School’s first sixth-grade class in 1948.
Bertha, whose family worshiped at the Episcopalian and Methodist churches, had been so impressed by the outreach of the Catholic religious men and women to the Black community that she had converted to Catholicism the previous year at age nine. The school was staffed by Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. She adored the nuns, about whom she later said, “We loved our teachers, because they first loved us.”
At age fifteen, Bertha told her parents she wanted to enter the FSPA order. When they said no—they did not convert to Catholicism until years later—she went on a hunger strike, which soon won their permission. She became the first African American nun of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, entering formation in 1953 at the motherhouse in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
A nun from the order, Sister Lina Putz, accompanied Bertha on the train trip from Mississippi to Wisconsin. Although Jim Crow laws were in force, remarkably, the Franciscan Sisters got permission for Bertha to travel with Sister Lina in a “whites only” passenger car for the journey. The LaCrosse Catholic Register ran a story about Bertha’s historic entry into the all-white religious order under the headline “Negro Aspirant.”
Three years into formation, Bertha took the religious name Thea, which means “of God” and is a feminine version of her father’s name, Theon. She had graduated from her congregation’s Saint Rose High School despite a year-long bout with tuberculosis that required a stay in a sanatorium.
She next pursued studies at Viterbo College (now Viterbo University) in LaCrosse, also run by her congregation. Trained as a teacher, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English, speech, and drama. She later attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she earned master’s and doctoral degrees in English, literature, and linguistics.
Both her master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation focused on the rhetorical skills of the martyr of moral conscience, statesman Saint Thomas More. Although a former favorite of Henry VIII, More was executed in 1535 for refusing to recognize Henry as supreme head of the Church in England. The king desired that power because of the Catholic pope’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. More’s famous last words speak to his refusal to betray his conscience: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” For her doctoral dissertation, Sister Thea analyzed a book More wrote while imprisoned the last year of his life, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. In it, “More logically—and sometimes humorously—explained the power of choosing right even if it meant grief for oneself and loved ones.”
Sister Thea’s biographers, Charlene Smith and John Feister, noted: “Everything about More’s spirit came alive for Thea. His intellectualism, his humor, his discipline, his devotion to family, his attitude toward suffering, his defense of truth were characteristics she emulated. He had become one of her heroes. . . . Thea likewise was elated with the rhetoric More used. . . . She incorporated Morian techniques of exposition, logic, and persuasion into her own subsequent writing, teaching, and speaking.”
As an educator for more than fifteen years, Sister Thea taught youth at Blessed Sacrament School in LaCrosse and at Holy Child Jesus High School in Canton, before serving as a professor at Viterbo College, the Catholic University of America (CUA), and Xavier University in Louisiana. At Xavier, she helped establish the Institute for Black Catholic Studies in 1980.
But her wide-ranging ministry was full of accomplishments, many of which flowed from her mission to re-inspire the Black community with Christ’s message. In 1968, while attending CUA, Sister Thea became a founding member of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, where her public speaking and singing began in earnest. In 1978, she returned to Mississippi to aid her elderly parents and to serve as Consultant for Intercultural Awareness for the Jackson Diocese, a position created for her to offer outreach to nonwhite communities and to foster interracial awareness—which expanded her speaking and singing nationally and internationally.
In 1987, the first African American Catholic hymnal, Lead Me, Guide Me, was published with significant contributions from Sister Thea. She recorded an album of spirituals in each of the next two years. In 1989, she helped establish the Thea Bowman Black Catholic Educational Foundation to provide scholarships to African American students at Catholic universities.
The year 1984 was one of deep loss for Sister Thea. In November, her mother died at age eighty-one. A month later, her father died at age ninety. It was also the year she began a six-year struggle for her own life. In March, Sister Thea was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She successfully fought the cancer for a year with surgery and treatment and for the next three years continued a full schedule of intercultural advocacy, speaking and singing, and teaching. At the request of the U.S. bishops, she also co‑ordinated and edited a book for ministry to Black Catholics titled Families: Black and Catholic, Catholic and Black. In 1988, she learned the cancer, which she had continued to fight, had spread to her bones.
“When I first found out I had cancer, I didn’t know if I should pray for healing, or life, or death,” she told Praying magazine in 1989. “Then I found peace in praying for what my folks call ‘God’s perfect will.’ As it evolved, my prayer has become, ‘Lord, let me live until I die.’ By that I mean I want to live, love, and serve fully until death comes.”
Sister Thea fulfilled that mission, maintaining an astonishing schedule of ministry for someone in chronic pain with terminal illness until near the end, when she died in her family home the morning of March 30, 1990.
Her grave is next to those of her parents at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. In keeping with her Franciscan simplicity, at her request, the inscription on her gravestone humbly states, “She tried.” She explained once: “I want people to remember that I tried to love the Lord and that I tried to love them.” That she succeeded was well articulated by writer Peter Jesserer Smith, who noted: “The disciple tried. The Lord made the saint. What a prophetic witness and testimony for our times.” On June 1, 2018, Sister Thea was given the title Servant of God, in the first step toward canonization.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Catholic Heroes of Civil and Human Rights: 1800s to the Present (Ignatius Press, 2024). All rights reserved.
