Authentically Black and Truly Female: The Catholic Church and the Right to a Rite

Nathaniel Tinner-Williams

Black Approaches to Theology

Dr. Modeste Malu Nyimi

July 16, 2020

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Introduction

“The Catholic Church in the United States, primarily a white racist institution, has

addressed itself primarily to white society and is definitely a part of that society. On the contrary,

we feel that her primary, though not exclusive work, should be in the area of institutional,

attitudinal and societal change.”1.

These were the first words issued collectively from Black Catholic clergy in the United

States. They were for many reasons groundbreaking in their time, and remain a controversial

point of departure to this day. Relatively few Americans see themselves as racists, and fewer still

would tolerate their beloved institutions being seen as the same. Yet, in their opening shot, their

Declaration of Independence, the Black Catholic Clergy spoke for the Black Catholic Church

(and perhaps for Black people overall) in saying, without reservation, that their overseers were

still malicious White masters and they, their Black brothers and sisters, were still slaves. This

was a microcosm of the overarching American story, and in that moment Black Catholicism took

a solid hack at their chains.

For the past 500 years, since the first known contact of Africa with what is now America

and the United States, there has been an ongoing discussion of “freedom”. This discussion has

always concerned the perception of truth and of God in other bodies, and also of the very notion

of ownership. Moreover, the first African in America was a slave and a Catholic, and the nation

that today includes the land he helped discover was founded on various notions of freedom,

juxtaposed with a peculiar notion of perpetual slavery2. In the minds of many of America’s

founders, humans could be owned—forever. In many of the the same minds, some humans

—”Black” humans—were uniquely suited for slavery, and for this reason remained as such along

1 Diana L Hayes, Forged in the Fiery Furnace : African American Spirituality (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 2012).
2 Mic 5:1 (NABRE)
 2
with their descendants. For some time thereafter, this notion went largely unquestioned, or at the

very least unconquered.

The Catholic Church in America, one of its founding religious groups (alongside

Protestant and deist factions), was not only party to this grave human error, but participant and

beneficiary3. Accordingly, it is only within the past century that there has been a steady stream of

academic texts and perspectives from the descendants of enslaved Africans in America,

reflecting on the shared meaning and processes that chart a path forward and away from so dark

an era, even while constantly looking back toward it to gain insight and, indeed, freedom.

Feeding from this tradition of Black Theology, not 75 years old (yet apostolic in its foundations),

I will in this paper argue that dismantling the de-incarnation of Black bodies and acknowledging

their right to freedom leads to a foundational and historical truth: the Church is a Black female

body. Moreover, I will argue that in imitating what this contains and obtaining what it promises

—that is, by dissecting the Christology, history, precedents, self-discovery and priesthood of

Black Catholic America—Black Catholicism ought to receive from Rome what Eastern

Christianity in Africa possesses by historical pedigree and what Black Protestants fugitively took

for themselves by sheer power of will: the right to a rite.

***

A Black Female Body

Interrogating the concept of freedom, Copeland latches onto the truths of Creation and of

the Spirit as foundational to the deconstruction and overcoming of anti-Black imposition and

error. In both of these truths we see the basic nature of Christ, as creator and as vessel of the

Spirit. Moreover, in His more direct contact and identification with mankind, we of course see

the Incarnation—Christ taking on a human body. In response, the human body now displays

3 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 40.

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more clearly its status as the house of God. Incompatible with this model is the treatment of the

human body as anything less than holy cathedrals and models of Christ.4 From this we can

understand Christian worship as the constant declaration of freedom, in spirit and in the mind

even if not in physical reality.5 Indeed, to worship God “in Spirit and in Truth” (i.e., the assent of

the mind to reality), is to model Christ and delegitimize physical slavery all at once. It fully

reconciles the human spirit with that of God.6 As the late Sr Thea Bowman once put it,

spirituality is “conscious contact with the Spirit that is God, who is above us, who transcends and

inspires us. It is conscious contact with the spirit that is ‘self,’ with the inner-self where memory,

imagination, intellect, feelings and body are caught up in the search for humanity.”7 To see this

Christological paradigm in the human experience, and more particularly in the Black female

body, is to see racism and Transatlantic chattel slavery for what it is: an attempt at de-

incarnation.

One rather straightforward example of the de-incarnation of the Black body was the

stripping of its full participation in basic Christian religion. The experience of Black slaves—the

highest concentration of which was in the very Catholic Brazil—included exclusion from what

Catholics profess to be the very means of grace: the sacraments. Seen as lesser beings, Black

Catholics were given secondary access to the Eucharist, the very body of Christ, if they were

given access at all; likewise, Confession was often rare or nonexistent, and holy orders were seen

4 The first three Black priests in America (the Healy brothers) more or less passed as White, the
first openly Black priest (Venerable Fr Augustus Tolton) had to study and be ordained in Rome,
the first openly Black priest ordained in America (Fr Charles Uncles, SSJ) would die estranged
from his religious order due to racist mistreatment (not unlike that experienced by other Black
priests of his era), and Black priests remain a disproportionately small number in the Church in
the year 2020.
5 Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil, “Despite Black Catholicism’s Rich History, African American Priests
Are Hard to Find” Angelus News, March 4, 2019, https://angelusnews.com/faith/despite-black-
catholicisms-rich-history-african-american-priests-are-hard-to-find/.
6 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology.”
7 Thea Bowman and Celestine Cepress, Sister Thea Bowman, Shooting Star : Selected Writings
and Speeches (La Crosse, Wis.: Franciscan Sisters Of Perpetual Adoration, 1999), 38.
 4
as out of the question. Denied the incarnated participation implied by baptism into the person
8

and body of Christ, the Black body would not act “in persona Christi” in America until 1886, not

in decent numbers until the 1950s, and not in equitable numbers to this very day.9 Theologian

Katie Grimes notes that as the world entered the Pax Americana, “when the Catholic church was

its most sacramentally active and parochially unified, it enacted the corporate vice of white

supremacy with great vigor,” concluding that “the world’s injustice almost always becomes the

church’s” 10. From the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Scamble for Africa, the Church remained

complicit (and often pioneering) in the deincarnation of Black bodies, which can only be healed

by a radical and robust reenvisioning of the body of Christ as Black, as it was seen not so long

ago.

To this aim, Copeland puts forth a concept she calls “Eucharistic solidarity”, which in its

own way is a reversing of the Eucharistic division seen when Black bodies were abused and

treated as lesser—especially in the context of the Catholic Church11. For Copeland, this is crucial

to deconstructing the experience of the African continent/diaspora (even down to the moniker of

“African”) and of the transformation from subject into object12. Therein we encounter an

important truth about the Black female body: it does not belong in a bottom-caste as a resultant

being owing herself to another, but rather an origin point (as humankind traces back to Africa)

and source of life (as all humans trace back to a woman). In the same way, the Black female

body of the Church is an origin point of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

8 W. K. McNeil, Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music (Taylor & Francis, 2013), 73.
9 Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in
the Great Migration (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 126-127.
10 Katie Walker Grimes, Fugitive Saints : Catholicism and the Politics of Slavery (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2017).
11 Grimes presents as an example the contrast between Sts Josephine Bakhita and Martin de
Porres (whose hagiographies and popular perceptions are more about White adjacency and
absolution than Black freedom), and Servants of God Mother Mary Lange and Thea Bowman
(whose legacies chiefly concern Black agency and worth, specifically that of the Black female
body).
12 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 45.
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***

Exploring the Past

In a very real sense, the Church traces back to Ethiopia, Alexandria, and Nubia.

Christianity germinated in an Asian and African context, one of the five preeminent sees of the

early Church was in Africa, and multiple African Christian communities dating to this period

still exist today. Two of the major communities survive to the present day along with their

unique liturgical rites, not only in two Oriental Orthodox churches but also sui iuris in two

Eastern Catholic particular churches. This has major implications for the Church, specifically the

groups within her that identify with the heritage of African slaves in America. In the same way

that the African-American female experience ought to be linked more fully and historically to

Africa itself, so must the Black Catholic Church. The Black female body—physical and spiritual

—must recognize her rightful roots and privileges.

While the Eurocentric urge objectifies the Black female body, defining it shortsightedly

in relation to its White dominator, the Afrocentric urge underscores the reality that there is no

African-American without “African”. In freeing itself of the White narrative, the Black body is

seen as originating in its ancestors, and in Christ “whose origin is from of old,” despite

appearances to the contrary13. Recovering such ancient roots is difficult, and has quite often led

to less centered/Christological religions such as Voodoo in Haiti and Black Islamic cults in

America.14 15 Even so, the work of self-recovery is nevertheless a powerful exercise of the Black

female body's capacity to create, germinate, and give birth. These processes within the Black

female body of the Church have already begun, seen in the practices and liturgies of today’s

Black Catholicism; however, it continues to face criticism and questioning rooted in the

Enlightenment decoupling of Black bodies from their true selves, as such African(-American)

13 Williams, “Black nuns”, 265.

14 Williams, “Black nuns”, 265-266.
15 George Dugan, “Blacks Lobby for Papal Interview,” Signs of Soul 4 (January 1972), 13.
 6
practices are derided as “irreverent”, “unserious”, “corrupting”, and illegitimately linked to

Africa16. But because liturgy is perhaps where the body is most fully expressed, the Black body

in liturgical action is in no need of special justification; moreover, as a unique, independent, and

indigenous expression, Black Catholic liturgy and worship is in fact worthy by nature of the

same official recognition within the Church that the Ethiopians and Coptics enjoy.

However, insofar as American Catholicism absorbed and internalized the error of

America’s founding government, its European heritage, and the Enlightenment writ large, the

resulting negrophobia caused an othering of both Black worship and Blackness in general. The

result was an apartheid Catholicism that took centuries to crack—and indeed, even as chains

were broken, freedom was not fully achieved. They were cracks in the system, not a full

disassembling. Black Catholics, in their segregated state, would not begin to see tangible

autonomy until taking it by force beginning in the 1960s. The result was an Africanization of the

Mass by way of musical and stylistic changes in line with both African-American and pan-

African cultural traditions, but these changes were not officially recognized by the Church

hierarchy—indeed, many were steadfastly opposed. Much of said hierarchy was still very much

under the sway of Enlightenment negrophobia, though under the guise of “Catholic tradition”

(which in its Eurocentrism naturally displayed such errors).

***

The Spark of Freedom

Beginning in the 1950s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire)

developed, experimented with, and eventually gained official curial recognition of the Zaire Rite,

a sub-rite of the Mass of Paul VI (the “Novus Ordo”).17 This was a monumental moment for the

rediscovery of Black African identity within Catholicism, though in that rediscovery came a

16 Williams, “Black nuns”, 268.

17 M. Shawn Copeland, Lareine-Marie Mosely, and Albert J. Raboteau, Uncommon
Faithfulness : The Black Catholic Experience (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2009).
 7
shedding of the flattened identity imposed upon that continent and its diaspora. This was not the

“African Use” of the Mass, but a setting specific to the culture of bodies of that self-determined

nation. It hearkened back to a time before Enlightenment, able to trace a kind of lineage back to

the ancient African rites of Ethiopia and Egypt, which exist within and outside of Catholicism to

this day. In seeing the Church once again as a Black female body as in Axum and Cairo, Zaire

looked ahead and began to chart a path forward. Indeed, despite its formulation in a particular

African culture, the Zaire Rite has become a popular form of the Mass throughout the African

continent, and is even borrowed from within African-American parishes in the United States.18 19

From this it is clear that the “freeing of the mind” spoken of by Copeland and in our

lectures has begun to take hold among African and African-descended Catholics the world over

—a kind of in-house solidarity—but the hoped-for recognition by the Church hierarchy has not

yet been seen in the modern era outside of the Congo Basin. For the American Catholic, this

raises a number of questions: Why has there not been a great proliferation of indigenous rites in

the time since Emancipation, African independence, Civil Rights, Black Power, and so on? In

what ways are the chains of Enlightenment thinking still laying claim to Black bodies in the

continent and in the diaspora? Why does Mother Church, in all her beauty and Blackness, yet

appear in her liturgical records and rites to be primarily an affair of absolutized White interests

and culture? For America’s part, it could be said, no doubt, that just as the Black female body,

freed from the chains of chattel slavery, thereafter endured the refashioned chains of

sharecropping, the Church plays out the same tragic drama. As such, we were for some time and

remain now in the sharecropping era of the American Church. As one priest recently put it: “The

bishops of the United States have their knees on the neck of Black Catholics.”20

18 Wilmore and Cone, Black Theology, 230.

19 Shannen Dee Williams, “Black nuns and the struggle to desegregate Catholic America after
World War I” (PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2013), 28, Graduate
School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
20 Williams, “Black nuns”, 220.
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***

Trouble In My Way

One objection to the creation of an African-American rite within the Church is the claim

that if they should develop and receive such a privilege, then the same would be owed to the

larger White Catholic patrimony in America. This, of course, assumes wrongly that Black

Catholicism is a mere volitional association of American Catholics. For White Catholics this

may be true, as their position in the country and in the Church has largely been that of comfort

and control, especially after the dawn of the concept of Whiteness. Indeed, the voluntary

flattening (or mild erasing) of European heritage that resulted in “Whiteness” served by its very

nature to reflexively homogenize Catholics of African descent as well—especially those

descended from slavery. As such, Black culture in America was formed by force and by choice

all all at once, a survival mechanism drawing on Africa and on Christ all at once in order to defy

death and thrive. Thus Black Catholicism and Black Christian spirituality in general was, as one

author puts it, “forged in the fiery furnace”.21 Let the reader take note that Shadrach, Meshach,

and Abednego were forced into their fraternity of fire, and are recognized by the Church for their

faith, perseverance, worship, and song.

With that in mind, the Black female body, made first an object, then an object of derision

and scorn, takes form in the Black Catholic experience as an initially involuntary but

nevertheless communal body of shared suffering, if not shared tribal or national origin. Within

this shared experience, a spirituality emerged that integrated East and West, pain and joy, dance

and stillness, shouting and silence. In an unchosen and yet fully divine way, the Black Catholic

experience crystallized across boundaries and borders, such that if one visited every Black

Catholic parish in America today, they would notice a distinct commonality not just in

21 Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume I:
1966-1979, 2nd ed. revised (Orbis Books, 1993), 230.
 9
Catholicity but in battle-forged culture and expression: a testimony of survival. The same cannot

likely be said of a survey of all White parishes in this land. Of course, there was a time when

these commonalities in worship did not necessarily exist in Black Catholicism. In fact, one might

not have spoken of a “Black Catholicism” at all. Most of the descriptions given above

concerning Black spirituality were seen almost exclusively in Black Protestant churches, which

most Black Christians have called home during American history and which had seized ecclesial

and liturgical independence early on in American history22. This kind of freedom was alien to

Black Catholics and was more or less not allowed, prior to Vatican II. The transformation that

occurred thereafter was no accident.

In a moment of Black Catholics uniquely realizing their need for solidarity (while also

coming to terms with and acting on the fact that they were still in many ways slaves), the Black

Catholic clergy in the United States met as a group for the first time in 1968, in response to

MLK’s assassination, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “shoot to kill” order during the ensuing

riots, and the ongoing mistreatment of the Black female body that is the Church23. At this

meeting they crafted a monumental statement declaring, alongside the words found at the

beginning of this paper, that Black Catholics must be given control not only in their own

communities, but as rightful (yet independent) members of the larger Church24. This meeting and

statement sparked off the “Black Catholic revolt” of 60s America, a “freeing of the mind” that

led to more open expression of Black and African culture in Black parishes, though without full

22 Katie L. Grimes, “Breaking the Body of Christ: The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of
White Supremacy,” Political Theology, 2017.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/1743171915Y.0000000005?
scroll=top&needAccess=true.
23 M Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Human Being (Minneapolis, Mn:
Fortress Press, 2009), 100.
24 Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad,
1990) 28-29.
 10
episcopal recognition or approval . And like the Black American community during slavery, the
25

Black Catholic community would find its way through the darkness largely by way of a Black

female guide; one of the leading voices of the 1968 Black Clergy Caucus meeting was in fact its

only female participant, Sr Martin de Porres Grey26. Just as Harriet Tubman guided others in

righteous disobedience (“the woods” of the Underground Railroad) toward what would

eventually come by law (“the clearing” of the 13th Amendment), Dr. Grey27 spearheaded an

unstoppable process of liberation that began by force but by nature calls for an eventual

recognition in canon law28.

***

A Shot at Freedom

The Enlightenment error assumes that Black life and culture is darkness, unable to house

or communicate the divine, a tool to be used rather than a house to be lived in.29 It is also an

instance of the “sarx” tradition of Christian theology and anthropology, arising in part from a

Platonistic emphasis and resulting in the aforementioned reduction of the Black body from

subject to object, from owner into capital. This contrasts with the “soma” tradition, which like

“sarx” is present in the writings of Paul but has a more positive connotation and legacy in the

Church.30 Crucial to this beautification is the economic dimension spoken of in Copeland’s text,

25 According to Catholic historian and Villanova professor Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, the
Catholic Church was at one point the largest corporate slaveholder in the whole of the United
States.
26 Modeste Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology," IBTH-5010-01: Black Approaches
to Theology (class Lecture, Institute for Black Catholic Studies, Xavier University of Louisiana,
New Orleans, LA, July 2020).
27 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology.”
28 Stephen J. Ochs, Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests,
1871–1960 (United Kingdom: LSU Press, 1993), 10.
29 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
30 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
 11
as resources and education are crucial to freedom and independence (and were the primary things

seized and withheld from Black bodies in reducing them to objects and capital)31.

The aforementioned Black Catholic Clergy Caucus statement corroborated this idea in

stating that “it is especially important that the financial resources channeled into the work of the

Church in the black community be allocated and administered by black Catholic leadership”.32

During the resultant Black Catholic revolt, a period of self-reflection and self-empowerment,

came an economic reckoning, with one Black parish in Chicago going so far as to fundraise in

order to maintain function and independence, later having their archdiocesan funds withheld by

the archbishop due to their unprecedented expression of Black Power and pride—and their

refusal to be subjugated.33 34 While the actions of this parish (and others like it) would eventually

be tolerated within the Church, there is yet work to be done. Toleration is not, after all, the same

thing as recognition. In a very real way, an African-American rite—the full ecclesial recognition

of the African-American inculturation and independence that began during this revolt—is a

necessary reclaiming of the “soma” tradition, instantiating the philosophical beautification of the

Black female body (of which Mother Church is a prime example).

This kind of recognition has been sought before, even though, as with many issues, the

Church has taken time to shed its Enlightenment biases. In October 1971, a delegation of five

prominent Black Catholics received an audience in the Vatican City with the Vatican Secretary

of State, the Pope’s second in command, to air their grievances and seek for a solution.35 This

31 Two parishes in the Bay Area, St Columba in Oakland and St. Paul of the Shipwreck in the
Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, have made use of the rubrics of the Zaire Use in their
Sunday morning Gospel Masses.
32 Otis R Taylor, “Oakland Priest Challenges Bishop over Church’s Attitudes on Race,”
SFChronicle.com (San Francisco Chronicle, June 22, 2020),
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-priest-challenges-bishop-over-church-s-
15355922.php.
33 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
34 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
35 Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, 144.
 12
meeting was prompted by a decision from the United States bishops’ (all of whom were White,

save for one auxiliary bishop) to grant only $150,000 of a $500,000 request from the National

Office for Black Catholics for their activities that year, alongside “the mass closings of black

Catholic schools” and lack of Black clergy in decision-making positions.36 Black Catholics saw

clearly that they had no power, no agency, and were being treated as such—they were still

slaves. But as is the case with any slaves who have begun the project of self-discovery and who

are committed to seeing the process through to freedom, these Black Catholics came to the

residence of the Pope himself, confident in their humanity and in their worth as agents

advocating for change.

Tragically, even though armed with Black Power and the knowledge that they were being

denied the essentials of liberation (“resources, employment, and education”), this remarkably

ambitious group encountered a Roman Catholic doing as Roman Catholics do.37 Archbishop

Bennelli responded with “skepticism,” viewing the Black Catholic delegation as little more than

property of (and certainly no more credible than) their episcopal overlords, who of course had

given themselves glowing reviews.38 The man with the power to flip the script entirely instead

recommended “patience” and “dialogue” with the American bishops, which has continued for

the 50 years since to the tune of continued withering of Black Catholic schools, vocations, and

practice.39 Even so, the precedent was set for Black Catholic self-determination, in requests even

if not in results. Perhaps the same Rome that rebuffed this fugitive transatlantic demand for

justice, a kind of reversed Middle Passage, might in the age of #BlackLivesMatter be ready now

to grant African America a true and lasting place within the rites of the Church.

***

36 Eileen Southern and W. W. Norton & Company, The Music of Black Americans : A History
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 80
37 Wilmore and Cone, Black Theology, 230.
38 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 52.
39 Grey eventually left religious life and earned her doctorate.
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A Holy Struggle

The story of “being Black” in American Catholicism, especially in the modern era, has

truly been a “struggle for authenticity”, a “conquest” of the flawed (un)reason of White

domination and perversion of others—including and perhaps chiefly the Black female body.40

This particular journey of discovery and legitimization is ongoing, a process of reincarnation in

which the body of God is seen in the body of the Black female self and proclaimed as such, over

and against all entrenchments of anti-Blackness. As Copeland notes, this is a radical

subjectification of the self that took place within the Black female as she freed her mind and

contemplated her own meaning.41 This naturally results in a kind of rebellion, both from White

presuppositions as well as the common Black “slavemind”. Catholic theologian Katie Grimes

speaks of this in terms of “fugitivity”, the wholesale rejection of the Black self as defined in

relation to White masterhood, in favor of a definition based in one’s freedom, (often forceful)

independence, and agency.42 43 Per Copeland, this kind of “resistance” rooted in African

anthropology defiantly proclaimed freedom in purpose and action even if not yet present in the

social or political order.44 Indeed, “sometimes only running away could redeem the body”45.

In like fashion, Black Catholics, beginning in the aforementioned 1960s revolt, began to

“steal away” in their own form of the Underground Railroad, in defiance of the White

superstructure of lay and clerical opposition. Over the past ~60 years, this has developed into a

40 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."

41 At issue was a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr, placed by Fr George Clements as an icon in a
parish altar, replacing St Anthony of Padua. His ordinary, Archbishop Cody, objected strongly.
Clements dared him to come remove the statue himself, noting that, should Cody do so,
Clements could not and would not protect him from harm (presumably at the hands of those
Black Chicagoans, including the local Black Panther party, who appreciated the altar and the
Afrocentric gesture it represented). Archbishop Cody never arrived. Thus, by popular
acclamation, the Black Catholic Church had canonized its first saint.
42 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
43 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 20.
44 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
45 Malu Nyimi, "Black Approaches to Theology."
 14
nearly complete integration of Black spirituality into Black Catholicism, after its relegation

primarily to Black Protestantism for so long. We are now at a point in history when American

bishops—if not the Roman Curia—are aware of, allowing, and at times celebrating the “Gospel

Mass”46 47. Yet the fact remains that there is no canonical recognition of this rite nor the history,

saints, clergy, devotions, and patrimony that inform and nourish it. In the same way that the

Emancipation Proclamation gave legal standing to those slaves who had escaped from their

masters, the full recognition of an African-American rite would be a kind of ultimate incarnation

of the Black female experience, the Church—the paradoxically female body of Christ—

instituting a de jure Blackness that she already possesses de facto.

Even so, a major obstacle to this objective, the recognition of a Black humanity and

agency that cannot be subsumed within a White or European superstructure, is the historic

exclusion of Black bodies from positions of power within that superstructure. This has

unfortunately bled into the Catholic Church as well, perhaps especially in America. In

accordance with the philosophical errors adopted from the Enlightenment, holy orders—which

are in reality open to all called and qualified men—were closed off to Black bodies in America

for most of its history.48 For roughly 400 years beginning with the first colonial contact between

slaveholding Europeans and what would become the United States, Black female bodies in

America produced children that could not attain priesthood but necessarily inherited slavehood.

This predicament has created a numerical and philosophical deficit that endures to this

day, as the priesthood in America remains disproportionately White (or, more precisely,

disproportionately non-Black)49. This has a corrosive psychological effect even today, much in

46 Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 1.

47 There are roughly 250 African-American priests today, slightly under 0.7% of the total
number of priests in America. Black Catholics make up over 4% of the American Church.
48 Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 114.
49 James Rudin, “Vatican II: The Beginning of the End of Catholic Anti-Semitism,” The
Washington Post, October 25, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/vatican-
ii-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-catholic-anti-semitism/2012/10/25/f2a2356e-1ee2-11e2-8817-
 15
the same way that many Black slaves after Emancipation were reluctant to leave their masters’

plantations and that White society continued to view Black people as subhuman long after the

chattel system was abolished. Despite the fact that more than 20% of the Catholic Church is of

Sub-Saharan African descent—truly a Black female body—Americans of all descents tend to see

Black bodies as inherently non-Catholic and African-American Catholics rarely aspire to the

priesthood.50 It is the responsibility of the Catholic hierarchy in America to make amends for this

deficit in whatever ways possible, as the life of Black Catholicism depends on it. Official

canonical recognition of an African-American rite would not on its own correct the downward

trend, but, according to Copeland, with solidarity comes renewal.51

***

Conclusion

One of the first Catholic priests of the African-American diaspora—indeed the first

openly-Black man ordained in the United States—had a habit, when entering a room full of

White priests, of throwing open a window (presumably in a kind of disgust).52 The context of this

habit was the inhumane treatment he often received from his brother Josephites and the Church

at large—at the time still openly infected with racism and a peculiar anti-Blackness. What

Copeland sees in the Black female slave often sacrificing her life in the fight for freedom is seen

by various historians in the Church’s first Black priests facing abuse and derision at every turn in

their pursuit and display of the Blackness of Mother Church. Her suffocation was concretely

evident in their daily lives. What needed no explanation was expressed in Fr Uncle’s simple act

of increasing the quality of what all humans need to survive—oxygen.

41b9a7aaabc7_story.html.
50 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 94.
51 Joseph L. Howze, “What We Have Seen and Heard: A Pastoral Letter on Evangelization from
the Black Bishops of the United States” (United States: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1984), 2.
52 Daniel Meloy, “‘Mass for Peace’ Strikes a New Chord.” Detroit Catholic, February 7, 2018.
https://detroitcatholic.com/news/daniel-meloy/mass-for-peace-strikes-a-new-chord.
 16
In the same way that Fr Uncles was wont to throw open the windows of a room full of the

noxious gas of Enlightenment dehumanization, Pope John XXIII in his call for the Second

Vatican Council declared that we must “throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh

air of the Spirit blow through.”53 By this he called for beautification of the Church in all corners

of the world, and within a decade the Black Catholic Church was calling its own councils,

making its own statements, and forging a new identity and praxis for Black Catholics from sea to

shining sea. We are now over 70 years and 5 Popes removed from the call for fresh air within the

Church, and Pope Francis perhaps models this vision moreso than any Pope of recent memory.

Would not this Pope gladly receive the proposal of an African-American rite, bringing much-

needed oxygen to the lungs of the ecclesial structure? It would seem that the time is more than

ripe, as the Black Catholic Church was said by the Black bishops to have “come of age” now

over 35 years ago54.

Christ as God is at its core God working in Christ and with Christ. He who was born of

the female body of the Virgin was by nature a cathedral of God in the most complete way, and

we as children of God and partakers in divinity are truly a model of this reality. God is with and

within all of those who belong to Him. Racism and slavery injured this conception, but did not

destroy it. In the intersection of the enslavement of Black bodies with the conversion of Black

bodies, the doors were flung wide to the truths evident within the most basic (and foundationally

Asian and African) makeup of the Church. In the experience and worship of those who were

both slaves to men and free in Christ, freedom was truly enfleshed with great immediacy if not

53 Several official settings of the African-American “Gospel Mass” have been commissioned
over the years by bishops and other groups, and some have arisen purely out of the desire of the
composer. Many have been celebrated thereafter by bishops, archbishops, and/or other priests.
Of note is the fact that a similarly indigenous setting of the Latin Mass, the “Missa Luba”, was
created in Zaire in 1957 before the Second Vatican Council and thereafter formed the partial
basis for the Zaire Rite.
54 Mark Pattison, “Approval for Zairian Rite Was a Long Time Coming, Says Congolese
Cardinal,” Catholic Philly, August 10, 2016, https://catholicphilly.com/2016/08/news/world-
news/approval-for-zairian-rite-was-a-long-time-coming-says-congolese-cardinal/.
 17
enacted physically and socially with the same urgency. In her taking on of increasing numbers of

Black people, the Church became more evidently not just a female body, but a Black female

body. In her body she possesses a multitude of expressions and rites, many that are altogether

ancient, but at least one that is new, and that is African, and that is born of the struggle to free

Black bodies from White oppression. It is the view of this author that she deserves at least one

more. In the end, the full beautification of the Church will come by her freeing her mind to see

that she is truly a Black female. Only in her Blackening will she become fully clean.
 18
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