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Black faith matters


A few years ago I researching Ven Augustus Tolton (the first American Black priest) for a book we wrote. And y’all, it was painful, embarrassing, and incomprehensible to read how many practicing, “faithful” American Catholics participated in slavery and post-slavery racism, and in all of their horrors: casual separation of families, physical abuse, denial of education and other rights of human dignity, purchase and sale of human persons, shunning from the Church.


These perpetrators were not the designated “bad guys”—these were priests and religious educators, seminary formators, families who were active in parish life. How is it possible that they could be so deep in religious formation and practice, but didn’t recognize—with enormous remorse and repentance—what they were doing to God’s own children?


If you know Fr Gus’s story, you know that there were many other Catholics who did recognize the moral evil and devoted themselves to justice, restoration, and reparation. But nonetheless, I was dumbstruck by how easily so many reconciled and justified grave immorality with their faith—with receiving the very Body of Christ at the same moment they suffocated and severed His members.


And honestly, it sobers me—how often have I done the same? We all like to think we’d be on the side of justice and truth, but wouldn’t those in the past have thought the same? Selfless love is unfathomably harder than we imagine, and always requires sacrifice. How often have I been willfully blind to the ways someone else pays a price for my own comfort and success?


Black faith matters, but not in some generic, generalized, sloganized way. Black faith matters because Black people matter. Every Black life is indeed a unique and unrepeatable human person who is willed, loved, and necessary. Black lives are not an ideological movement but individual persons, each the result of a thought of God Himself. This single, solitary reason alone is enough to require no other justification or qualification or condition to the statement: Black people matter.


It must always be personal when it's about persons. We are one body; when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. We cannot be whole until we allow the suffering of others to become as real and urgent as our own. There is everything else that needs to happen, and there are our brothers and sisters who must remain precious.


Jesus, shine the light of lights into every dark corner where we hide our selfishness, show us what we really are, plunge us into the fire of truth, and burn away every fragment of use instead of love.

Read

Watch and listen

  • A Place at the Table: A documentary by our friend Dave Warren featuring the powerful stories of six Black Catholics (most of them American!) on the road to canonization

  • Servant of God Sr Thea Bowman's 1989 speech to the U.S. bishops

  • The Ark and the Dove podcast: A five-episode narrative podcast investigating the complex dynamics of race and religion in America through the lens of the Black Catholic Church

  • Black Faith Matters: A short documentary that's close to my heart—it's shot in and stars the New Orleans neighborhood of Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in our country. Tremé is also the birthplace of jazz and the childhood neighborhood of Ven Henriette deLille. Through the eyes of Black Catholics in various vocations and walks of life, we see how this experience of Black Catholicism is a gift to the Church.



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