As a Black woman who has been a member of the Roman Catholic Church all of my life, it would have never occurred to me while growing up that being both Black and Catholic was considered an anomaly.
It also would have never occurred to me that my racial and religious backgrounds combined to form what is generally considered a disparate identity. After all, the parish where I spent the beginning of my childhood was predominantly Black. There were a number of other Black parishes in Philadelphia, my hometown. I knew that my family’s place in the Catholic Church spanned hundreds of years through my great-grandmother’s hometown of New Orleans, through her great-grandparents’ hometowns in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and back even farther to Spain.
I grew up believing — and still believe with every fiber of my being — that my family was as Catholic as any one family could be. After all, didn’t every Black Catholic family’s story sound like mine? Didn’t non-Black Catholics (and White Catholics, in particular) know that Black families had long trajectories in the Catholic Church? It was not until I was an adult that I realized the answers are “not exactly” and “no.”
In Black and Catholic, I explore the institutional white supremacy that created tremendous obstacles for early Black priests, such as Augustus Tolton and Charles Randolph Uncles. I also look at the ways Black Catholics bring elements of cultural expression into liturgy. In addition, I highlight the historical impact of white supremacy on Black Catholics’ ability to access parishes and its contemporary repercussions in cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, as many parishes in those cities have faced closures.
Institutional Racism and the Ultra-White Space
There are 43.8 million Black people in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University estimates there were 76.3 million self-identified Catholics in the U.S. last year. Self-identified Catholics do not necessarily belong to a parish or participate in the sacraments. As of 2017, there were three million Black Catholics in the U.S., according to U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). That figure includes Black Americans whose ties to the U.S. go back centuries as well as recent immigrants and their families.
Given the number of Blacks and the number of Catholics coupled with the scope and breadth of the U.S. Catholic Church, the number of Black Catholics is disproportionately low. In fact, the numbers don’t add up. Why don’t these numbers add up?
Institutionally, the U.S. Catholic Church purports itself to be what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls the “cosmopolitan canopy.” In The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, Anderson defines the “cosmopolitan canopy” as “settings that offer a respite from the lingering tensions of urban life and an opportunity for diverse peoples to come together.” Elsewhere, he describes it as “a diverse island of civility located in a virtual sea of racial segregation.” However, the Church really is an extreme or “ultra” version of what Anderson calls “the [W]hite space,” or “…settings in which [B]lack people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.”
Catholic institutions are not a multiracial cosmopolitan canopy. The Catholic Church’s systemic racism makes it a White space. The fact that it purports to be a cosmopolitan canopy, or catholic (“universal”), despite this reality makes it an ultra-White space. We need not look further than, among other places, the ranks of the priesthood, religious life, the episcopate, and the diaconate for evidence of this. The USCCB’s 2017 U.S. demographics report lists 250 African-American priests (among what would be a total of 37,302 priests); 437 African-American deacons (among more than 18,500); 400 African-American religious sisters; and 50 African-American religious brothers.
The U.S. Catholic Church is as an “ultra-White space” because Catholic institutions exist as intentional White spaces while purporting to be cosmopolitan canopies. Catholic institutions are intentional White spaces contemporarily because their leadership has yet to truly confront the historical, overt exclusion of African Americans and other racial minorities. Consequently, the contemporary White space doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, it exists because of historical realities. Until those realities are confronted and structurally dismantled, the U.S. Catholic Church will continue to be an ultra-White space. This ultra-White space exists throughout Catholic institutions including educational spaces, professional spaces, and especially liturgical spaces.
That there are three million Black Catholics in the U.S. means more Blacks are Catholic than are members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Protestant denomination founded by Black Americans. Yet, that denomination is readily identified with the Black experience while Catholicism is not. Three million Black Catholics is not a massive number, but neither is it insignificant. Three million people deserve a place at the table.
The Exoticism of Black Catholics
Black Catholics have had to justify their presence in the Church in a way White Catholics have not.
Being Black and Catholic encompasses both the heartache of racism and discrimination and the comfort of being able to draw on the strength and means of resiliency passed down through generations.
In 1989, pioneering educator and scholar of Black Catholics Dr. Sister Thea Bowman became the first African-American woman to address the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Bowman, the only Black member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration and currently being considered for possible sainthood, told her predominantly-White audience:
“What does it mean to be Black and Catholic? It means that I come to my Church fully functioning. That doesn’t frighten you, does it? I come to my Church fully functioning. I bring myself, my Black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become. 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 a gift to the Church.”
That Bowman had to make such a forceful case for Black Catholic presence in 1989, when they already had been in North America for hundreds of years, indicates the extent to which Black Catholics were marginalized in the Church.
Being Black and Catholic encompasses both the heartache of racism and discrimination and the comfort of being able to draw on the strength and means of resiliency passed down through generations. Being Black and Catholic inspires celebration both rooted in the music and traditions of the African-American religious experience and informed by the beliefs and rituals of Roman Catholicism. These gifts that Bowman so poetically articulated are rooted in Black Catholics’ culture and experiences and, therefore, are unique to Black Catholics. However, the gifts themselves are as diverse as the Black Catholic community. These gifts are also as a means of filling the enormous gulf that exists in the literature on American Catholicism.
Scholars from various disciplines have contributed vast amounts of knowledge to our intellectual understanding of American Catholicism on a wide array of issues. Yet, only a small amount of that work focuses on race. Only a paltry sum focuses on systemic racism and racial justice. Sociologists have woefully understudied race and American Catholicism, especially when it comes to African-American Catholics. Sociological work that purports to examine race and Catholicism often does so through a cultural lens (i.e., via customs, beliefs, values, etc.). These works are devoid of discussions on racism and racial justice. This void is yet another reason why the necessary reckoning with racism and all of its consequences has yet to happen in the Catholic Church. We can’t confront what isn’t acknowledged.
One thing my work does not do is succumb to the trope of what I call the Exoticism of Black Catholics. The Exoticism of Black Catholics — principally by White scholars — has resulted in the erroneous perception that Black Catholics have only existed in the U.S. since the mid-20th century.
My forthcoming book does not perpetuate the erroneous supposition that Black Catholics only meaningfully came into being during the decades of the Great Migration. To wit, while St. Patrick was casting snakes out of Ireland in the 4th century, people of African descent practiced Roman Catholicism. Black Catholics are not a new phenomenon. What’s new is White scholars realizing they exist.
The Exoticism of Black Catholics describes the way White scholars portray Black Catholics’ existence and practice as something new and alluring. For example, in his 2017 book, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration, author Matthew J. Cressler extols two adult, African-American sisters — who are life-long Catholics born and raised in New Orleans — for being comfortable attending Mass in Latin. Mind you, the incident described takes place in 1939, more than 25 years before the introduction of vernacular Mass. In 1939, any Catholic anywhere in the world absolutely should have been comfortable attending Mass in Latin! The fact that these sisters’ comfort is articulated as an exception and not the rule is exoticism. When White Catholics generally — and White scholars of Catholicism especially — do this, they fetishize Black Catholicism as well as Blackness by taking something perfectly beautiful because it is ordinary and give it an aura of the extraordinary or exotic. This happens only because what they encounter is new and unusual within the context of whiteness.
“I challenge the institution that is the U.S. Roman Catholic Church and its scholars to acknowledge this racism as well as the white supremacy at its root. This work is essential if the Roman Catholic Church is to be catholic in practice and action instead of only in name and theory.”
What the Exoticism of Black Catholics reveals is the inability of White scholars to see anything other than whiteness as the center. Therefore, anything that’s not in the center is “othered.” In approaching it as special, unusual, or exotic, what these scholars are really doing is othering and delegitimizing the Black Catholic experience. If it’s not White, it’s not legitimate. Thus, White academics’ whole scholarly enterprise is cloaked in a racism they cannot see, yet is of their own making. In short, unconscious bias is given legitimacy because it is called scholarship.
My work is different from much of the extant literature because I provide empirical sociological research that addresses race and religion in a way that generally is not done. I take on what it is like to be a racial minority — specifically, an African American — in an inherently racist church.
I challenge the institution that is the U.S. Roman Catholic Church and its scholars to acknowledge this racism as well as the white supremacy at its root. This work is essential if the Roman Catholic Church is to be catholic in practice and action instead of only in name and theory.
Nevertheless, Black Catholics Persist
Systemic racism as a specific form of white supremacy has kept Black Catholics out of positions of power within the Church’s organizational structure — which, in turn, has contributed to low numbers of representation throughout the institution’s U.S. presence. Historically, Black Catholics have been denied access to the structures of both power and simple membership in Catholicism, including in parishes, religious life, and especially the priesthood. Even for those who were able to gain access, what resulted was a constant uphill struggle to maintain it.
Despite this reality and centuries of struggle, the Black Catholic community in the U.S. persists. It persists in bringing a unique cultural expression into liturgy. It persists in Black Catholics fighting to keep their churches and schools open when it can often feel like dioceses are tearing through Black communities like Sherman marching through Atlanta.
Despite all of this, I persist. I persist as a scholar studying the sociological intersection of race and religion even though there is resistance to such work in the discipline. I persist as a Black Catholic woman in a Church that exhibits hostility toward my very existence. I persist in writing a book that is excruciatingly difficult to write because doing so requires that I work through my own pain in the process — something my White colleagues will never understand, despite their claims of expertise on Black Catholics.
I must persist.
As I often told my students, sociological study at its most basic level is about power — who has it, who doesn’t, and who’s going to keep them from getting it. Power in society is easily visualized as a pie — a power pie, if you will. In the closing line of the theme song to “The Jeffersons,” Ja’Net DuBois (and more recently Jennifer Hudson) sings, “We finally got a piece of the pie!” When looking at Black Catholics, we can see that much has changed. We now have Black Catholics in positions of power as priests, bishops, and members of religious orders. Woefully, there are only a few. Most concretely, we see Black Catholics’ rise to power in Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s installation as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., one of the country’s most prominent episcopal positions. So while we finally have a piece of the pie, it is a small piece and full inclusion has yet to be achieved. There is still much work to be done to have a Catholic Church that is truly catholic.
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For further reading:
- The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (W. W. Norton & Company) by Elijah Anderson
- “The White Space” (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Vol. 1(1) 10–21) by Elijah Anderson
- Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press) by Matthew J. Cressler
- The History of Black Catholics in the United States (The Crossroad Publishing Company) by Cyprian Davis
- Catholic Parishes of the 21st Century (Oxford University Press) by Charles E. Zech, Mary L. Gautier, Mark M. Gray, Jonathon L. Wiggins, and Thomas P. Gaunt
Photo by EssamSaad 
