Healing the Wounded Body: A Catholic Theology of Reparation

This discussion focuses on anti-Black racism in the Catholic Church in the United States and on our need to make reparations for it. At the outset, it must be said that the scope of what follows is limited in three ways. First, it focuses on anti-Black racism. Although there are many forms of racism to be considered, such as racism toward Irish, Italians, Asians, Hispanics, Eastern Europeans, Native Americans, and other racial or ethnic groups, a premise of this paper is that anti-Black racism is uniquely pernicious and warrants special attention. Second, it focuses on racism in the United States. Although anti-Black racism has been a reality in many countries, and although anti-Black racism in America actually predates the founding of the United States, this paper assumes that in the United States anti-Black racism has been especially egregious and warrants special attention.

Second, this discussion focuses on anti-Black racism in the Catholic Church in the United States rather than on the entire nation. There is clear and considerable overlap between racist dynamics in the Church and in the nation, for Catholics make up a sizable portion of the nation’s population (roughly twenty percent over the past century) and Catholics are obligated to try to understand and deal with their nation’s past and present. But the central premise of what I have to say is that the Catholic Church in the United States can and should focus unflinchingly on the racism of its own past and can and should do so with the help of its distinctive doctrines, traditions, penitential practices, and pastoral wisdom. In short, the focus here is ecclesial.

It must also be said that the premise of this discussion is that the Church as the Body of Christ can be wounded by sin but can also be healed by practices of reparation, as suggested in the Pauline idea that our sacrifices and sufferings complete the hardships still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of the body, the Church (Col 1:24). Especially hurtful to the Catholic Church are wounds that are self-inflicted, of which there are many. Among the most damaging of these are the wounds of anti-Black racism. Is it possible that the Body of Christ can be healed of this ugly and deep wound?

I maintain that the Church can be healed of its past sins of anti-Black racism, and it does so in three installments: (1) by setting forth a Catholic theology of reparation; (2) by sketching out the history of anti-Black racism in the Catholic Church in the United States in the practices of slavery and segregation up to the present; and (3) by offering pastoral reflections and practical examples on how reparations can be practiced so as to heal the Body of Christ. In making a Catholic case for Catholic reparations for racism, this argument is grounded in a belief in the salvific work of Jesus Christ, whose atoning death made reparation for the sins of fallen humanity, for as once we were locked into the prison of disobedience, now, by the mercy of God, we have been brought along the way of eternity (See: Romans 11:32).

Part One: A Catholic Theology of Reparation

A clear set of statements on the Catholic theology of reparation can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In its exposition of the doctrine of creation and the fall, the Catechism explains that Christ, the New Adam, undid humanity’s disobedience by taking on the role of the suffering servant, bearing the sins of many on the cross: “Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father” (CCC §615), an act that “confers on Christ’s sacrifice its value as redemption and reparation as atonement and satisfaction” (CCC §616, italics mine). This idea is linked to the Eucharist, which “is offered in reparation for the sins of the living and the dead and to obtain spiritual or temporal benefits from God” (CCC §1414).

It appears again in relation to penance and reconciliation, where the Catechism teaches that after wronging one’s neighbor, “one must do what is possible in order to repair the harm (e.g., return of stolen goods, restore the reputation of someone slandered, pay compensation for injuries). Simple justice requires as much.” While it is true that “absolution takes away sin,” the Catechism explains, “it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for the sin: he must ‘make satisfaction for’ or ‘expiate’ his sins. This satisfaction is called penance” (CCC §1458). Hence the need for reparation after violating the seventh commandment: “reparation for injustice requires the restitution of stolen goods to their owner.” After citing the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 29:8, the Catechism offers this instruction:

Those who, directly or indirectly, have taken possession of the goods of another, are obliged to make restitution of them, or to return the equivalent in kind or in money if the goods have disappeared, as well as the profit or advantages their owner would have legitimately obtained from them. Likewise, all who in some manner have taken part in a theft or who have knowingly benefited from it—for example, those who ordered it, assisted in it, or received the stolen goods—are obliged to make restitution in proportion to their responsibility and to their share of what was stolen (CCC §2412, cf. §2454).

A similar call for reparation is included in the teaching on the eighth commandment against bearing false witness:

Every offense committed against justice and truth entails the duty of reparation, even if its author has been forgiven . . . If someone who suffered cannot be directly compensated, he must be given moral satisfaction in the name of charity. This duty of reparation also concerns offenses against another’s reputation. This reparation, moral and sometimes material, must be evaluated in terms of the extent of the damage inflicted. It obliges in conscience (CCC §2487).

Taken together, these passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church show the centrality of the concept of reparation, and the related concepts of repentance and restitution, to the teaching of the Catholic Church. It is linked both to the cross of Jesus Christ, who died in expiation for our sins (1 John 2:2), and to the life of the Church, in particular to the sacraments of the Eucharist, which unites the faithful to Christ’s offering to the Father, and of Penance and Reconciliation, which heal the wounds of sin and division. This is no surprise, for the concept of reparation has long had central significance in the Catholic tradition. For example, Augustine in De Trinitate writes on how the divine image implanted in humanity at the creation has now been repaired through Christ, the New Adam, who thereby recovers for us the unity and solidarity that was lost in the Fall.[1] Anselm explains that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is a repayment for the debt incurred by sin, which Christians are called to acknowledge by ceaselessly offering their lives back to God.[2] And for Thomas Aquinas, the incarnation is the fitting means by which God repairs humanity—a reparation that withdraws us from evil, assists us in attaining the good, and thereby enables us to grow in love of God and neighbor.[3] These themes are repeated many times by various authorities in the spiritual and theological traditions of the Church.

All of which indicates that the concept of reparation has a central significance in the Catholic tradition, grounded in the theology of atonement. Thus we read in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) that reparation is “a theological concept closely connected with those of atonement and satisfaction, and thus belonging to some of the deepest mysteries of the Christian Faith.” The entry is worth quoting at length because it defines the reparation in the most fundamental theological terms:

It is the teaching of the Faith that man is a creature who has fallen from an original state of justice in which he was created, and that through the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of the Son of God he has been redeemed and restored again in certain degree to the original condition. Although God might have condoned men’s offences gratuitously if he had chosen to do so, yet in his Providence he did not do this; he judged it better to demand satisfaction for the injuries which man had done him. It is better for man’s education that wrong doing on his part should entail the necessity of making satisfaction. This satisfaction was made adequately to God by the Sufferings, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ, made Man for us. By voluntary submission to his Passion and Death on the Cross, Jesus Christ atoned for our disobedience and sin. He thus made reparation to the offended majesty of God for the outrages which the Creator so constantly suffers at the hands of his creatures. We are restored to grace through the merits of Christ’s Death, and that grace enables us to add our prayers, labors, and trials to those of Our Lord “and fill up those things that are wanting in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1:24). We can thus make some sort of reparation to the justice of God or our own offences against him, and by virtue of the Communion of Saints, the oneness and solidarity of the mystical body of Christ, we can also make satisfaction and reparation for the sins of others.[4]

In addition to offering this formal definition of reparation, this entry goes on to note that this doctrine is the basis for the founding of many confraternities such as the Archconfraternity of Reparation (1847) and the Archconfraternity of the Holy Face (1851). It also links the doctrine to the devotion to the Sacred Heart and notes that Pope Leo XIII approved of a confraternity dedicated to the Mass of Reparation in 1886.[5]

These twin doctrines of atonement and reparation, then, are embedded in Catholic tradition. But we must acknowledge that a problematic image of God has emerged alongside these doctrines, the image of a vengeful Father whose demand for justice is satisfied only with the death of his Son on the cross. This image gained currency with the Jansenist movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has distorted Catholic discourse down to the present day. One reaction to this warped image of God has been to reject atonement/reparation theology as opposed to the love of God, a strategy designed to appeal to more modern sensibilities. But this strategy is itself problematic, for it neglects key passages in scriptural (e.g., 1 John 2:2, 3:16, 4:9-10; Rom 5:8) and patristic and medieval sources (cited above), thus dispensing with a central, centuries-long Church teaching. So rather than set aside atonement/reparation theology, as some modern theologians do, we should strive to reconcile these seemingly conflicting themes in our tradition into an integrated theological vision—God’s justice but also God’s abundant mercy, God’s wrath but also God’s steadfast love—in which we all participate in the mystery of the atonement and are thus transformed into the holiness of God (2 Cor 5:21).

This is the task taken up by Margaret Turek in her insightful book Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology. Resisting “the modern aversion to atonement theology,” Turek reconstrues the doctrine of the atonement by positioning it in the context of God’s ultimate intention of enabling humanity to “participate in the atoning mission of Christ.”[6] She draws heavily on the Old and New Testaments and on a “quartet of theologians,” namely, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Norbert Hoffmann, to present a participatory approach to the atonement.

Turek advances her argument by making three points.[7] The first point is that the atonement is forged through God’s sovereign initiative. The covenant with ancient Israel, and the processes and structures contained in it, are “patrogenetic,” that is, initiated by God out of love.[8]

The second point is that God is not aloof to this covenant but rather passionately involved in it; God can be hurt, betrayed, angry at Israel’s hardness of heart. God’s passion for Israel does not undermine divine transcendence, immutability, and impassability, Turek argues; rather it displays the love of Christ who, assuming the role of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah and the pierced one in Zechariah, handed his life over to sinners in expiation for our sins—the ultimate act of divine mercy and love.[9]

The third point is that this initiative and passionate involvement on the part of God draws forth from sinful humanity a like response of suffering love, so that the people of God participate in the dynamics of this atonement as genuine agents who, having sinned, not only turn back to God and away from the evil done, but actually undo the evil and overturn the power of sin. In this sense, Turek writes, sin must be borne away, it must be carried, and the hearts of the repentant take on that role, becoming “co-atoners” along with and in imitation of Christ. Herein lies the key to the puzzling Pauline notion of the Father making the son “to be sin” so that we may become “the holiness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).[10] The Church becomes the locus where the followers of Christ embody the atoning death of Christ. The exemplary figure here is Mary, the one who stands at the foot of the cross and serves as personification of the Church.

So too the martyrs, including those of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, who make of their lives an offering to God.[11] The same is true of the saints—Therese de Lisieux and Mother Theresa of Calcutta are named—and indeed all the followers of Christ. We are all called to engage in a “spirituality of atonement,” to be ready to do good out of the wealth of divine grace, to perform works of mercy, even to our enemies and those who do evil.[12] Drawing on the work of Gary Anderson, Turek shows that acts of charity in the Old and New Testaments are cast in the mode of atoning for one’s sins.[13] It is a sharing in the love-offering of the Son to the Father, now offered too by the followers of Christ in the filial love established by the Holy Spirit. In short, Christ’s atonement in and through the cross is embodied and reenacted by the Church.

This third point on the participatory dimension of the atonement is crucial, for it offsets an overly forensic, juridical conception and it makes clear that the atonement must be embodied, enacted, made real, so to speak, through ecclesial practices. Paramount among these are the sacraments of course, which, in the words of Norbert Hoffmann (the least well known of one of Turek’s quartet of theologians), “make it possible to transform sin and its objective effects in one’s own life and in the world into atonement, that is, to ‘bear’ it as the Son bears his estrangement from the Father.”[14] Turning to Hoffmann’s text, we see that just as Christ performs representational atonement for others on the cross, so too do Christians perform representational atonements for others. This emphasis on performance guards against seeing the atonement as an “impersonal, automatic process” occurring beyond the life of a believer”; atonement “is not concerned with a ‘soul’ beyond world and history”; rather it “offers the human being in the locus of his existence, in the concrete conditions of his real world, a ‘place’ as son.” For this reason, “God’s power is such that even the sinful self is not excluded, bypassed or made to feel small; it is not merely dealt with or overpowered by a magical forgiveness. In contact with the sinner, God’s power does become a forgiving power, but it takes full effect in him in the mode of his own atonement.”[15] Elaborating on this point, Hoffmann writes:

The suffering of Christians “complete” those of Christ, not in an additive sense, but by putting Christ’s sufferings into effect. In no way can Christians’ sufferings be viewed as something independent “alongside” or “beyond” the atonement of Christ, but only as the making effective, the gracious occurrence, of the “for us,” the “representative dimension” of Jesus’ atoning act.”

If it is true that the Christian’s relation to Christ is constitutive of him, and that, conversely, Jesus’ relation to the sinner (“for him”) is constitutive of him as the Christ . . . it follows that the atonement performed by Christians is an inner factor in the atonement of Christ: in it, Christ is constituted as the Atoner in his own pleroma; in us, Christ’s atonement “blossoms.” Our atonement is his glory.[16]

In other words, Christ “is not to substitute for sinners, to replace them, but to em-place them, to establish them as sons (and hence as atoning sons). In and through Christ, the great Atoner, sinners too are to be sons and atoners—for this is the only way sinners can be sons.” “Christ is uniquely and inimitably ‘atonement’: but so are we, really and truly.”[17]

For Hoffmann, the most vivid symbol of the call to perform the atonement is that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, “the Pierced One.” At the climax of this dark drama of the Cross, the side of Jesus is pierced by the soldier’s lance, out of which flows blood and water, signs not of death, but of life amid death, life transforming death, bringing forth the life-giving sacraments of the Church. Sin is thus transformed into grace and communion among the disciples of Christ, who are now summoned to bring this transformative dynamic to all humanity. The Father’s love is refused in the crucifixion of the Son, the “cold steel” penetrating his most vulnerable part, his Heart; but the Son refuses the refusal, and so atones and bears the sin of humanity, overcoming sin by transforming it into its opposite. Where once there was the loneliness and separation of hell, now there is the intimacy of children with a ceaselessly merciful and loving Father. The practice of beholding the Pierced One, gazing upon the Pierced Heart, extends the consolation of Christ into Church and thus into the world, where we are all called to be atoners as well.[18] Thus “the Christian in this world,” according to Hoffmann,

. . . must be someone who atones in a representative capacity. For under the conditions of sin, love must necessarily take the form of atonement: atonement is the “for” mode of existence in a sinful world, it is the effectiveness of caritas in response to the fundamental distress of our . . . alienation from the Father . . . and hence it is the authentically Christian form of solidarity. The believer who knows that he himself has been redeemed by the Son from the evil void of sin and brought into the child’s nearness to the Father will look up to the wounded Heart of Jesus, and in doing so he will “be for others” in such a way that he will help bear and endure their own sin (cf. Gal 6:2; Eph 5:1ff., Rom 15:1-3).[19]

In short, Christians are true children of the Father only to the extent that they put the atonement into practice.[20]

What is so compelling about Hoffmann’s account of the spirituality of the Sacred Heart, as well as Turek’s participatory account of atonement, is that the practice of reparation is located in its proper theological and ecclesial context: in union with the offering of Christ to the Father, members of the Church offer their lives in worship and charity as the way to undo, and thus overcome, the consequences of sin. As Turek notes, we see this dynamic self-offering in the lives of Mary as the model of the church, and of Therese de Lisieux and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. And we also see it in the witness of several modern martyrs such as Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, for example, who wrote in a letter on the day he was martyred, “may God accept my life as a sin offering not merely for my sins but also for others’ sins”; St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), who offered her life for “the atonement” of the Jewish people, “for the salvation of Germany and for world peace”; the Trappist monks of Notre Dame d’Atlas in Algeria, who lived from the roots of their first Love, praying, in the words of Fr. Celestine, “O Jesus, I accept with all my heart that your death is renewed and fulfilled in me. . . ,” among many others.[21] Such martyrs are exemplars for all of us, called as we are to make reparation for our own sins and for the sins of all humanity.

In sum, we see a theology of reparation is featured in the images, texts, symbols and rites that make up the Catholic universe: the Mass, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Adoration, devotion to the Sacred Heart, and so on. And from within this web of beliefs and practices we can not only further articulate a theology of reparation but also further develop its practices. Such a task was set forth by Pope Saint John Paul II in his dramatic call for the Catholic Church to undertake a process of purification of memory and repentance as a way to mark, in the words of his apostolic letter, “the coming of the third millennium.”[22] John Paul II’s letter contained an unprecedented acknowledgment by the Catholic Church of past sins and faults, focusing on the wounds inflicted by Catholics through persecution of other Christians or other religions, through intolerance and the use coercive authority, and other past offences. This call for a purification of memory and repentance applies to any number of sins, desecration of a sanctuary, sexual abuse of children, and others—including, surely, the sins of racism. And if reparation is a constitutive part of repentance, then the Catholic Church in the United States must be willing to make reparation for the sins of racism. But this means, as a next step, recounting the history of racism in the Catholic Church in the United States—a small step indeed, but one that is necessary for extending the power of reparation, which is, in the words Pope Francis in his encyclical Dilexit Nos, “an extension of the heart of Christ” (§191).

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