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FutureChurch’s Women Witnesses for Racial Justice series continues with a celebration on the Solemnity of the Assumption, honoring the power and creativity of women – particularly women of color. Presider: Vickey McBride Witness: Naudia Loftis Readers: Crystal Catalan and Rose Lue Music reprinted and streamed under ONE LICENSE #A-737115.
This set of stations reflects on the stories of courageous Black Catholic Women who relied on their faith and dedicated themselves to living and sharing it despite bearing the unjust crosses of racism, slavery, poverty, segregation, sexism, and exclusion.
Each time Jesus falls, participants are invited reflect on exceprts from Catholic Social Teaching on the issue of race and racism. By doing so, we acknowledge — before God and before one another — that we, as individuals and as a community of believers — have failed to live the Gospel values of freedom, equality, solidarity, and inclusion we claim.
Art: Stations of the Cross by Janet McKenzie. Copyright 2013 by Janet McKenzie. Used with permission. Visit www.janetmckenzie.com.
To learn more, download our resource packet. Women Witnesses for Racial Justice resource packets include:
In 1943, Anna “Madre” Bates of Detroit, founded Our Lady of Victory, a Catholic mission in her neighborhood where white supremacy and segregation were rampant and where white ecclesiastical authorities resisted her advocacy.
The city’s disturbing segregationist policies and unjust living conditions imposed on Black Detroiters naturally created tensions in the city. In 1941, the city, eager to build a new housing development for white Detroiters, built an eight foot segregation wall (sometimes referred to as the “wailing wall”) that extended a half-mile long just blocks from the new Our Lady of Victory mission site. The wall was built to keep Black citizens out of white communiites in northwest Detroit. Just two years later, riots broke out as whites defended their territory against their fellow Black citizens.
Seeing the profound need for a Catholic presence and mission in her neighborhood, Mother Anna Bates spent ten years petitioning the archdiocese to provide Catholic worship to Black residents who were not permitted to enter any of the neighboring white Catholic Churches. Nearby Catholic parishes, including Presentation Church, were adamantly opposed to welcoming Black Catholics. The pain of that exclusion was deepened when ecclesiastical authorities suggested that Mother Bates’ neighborhood could not support a Catholic mission since it was in a “Protestant stronghold.”
Still, Mother Bates would not give up on her vision.
To learn more, download our resource packet. Women Witnesses for Racial Justice resource packets include:
Artist: Chloe Becker. Comissioned by FutureChurch.
“We recall the boldness of Bishop Harold Perry, SVD, who challenged his brother bishops to address the overt and covert stains of racism that prevent Black Catholics from fully participating in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.” –Dr. Kirk P. Gaddy
The Black Catholic History Rosary was developed by the late Dr. Kirk P. Gaddy in June of 2014. Dr. Gaddy invites prayers to reflect using the traditional method praying of the Rosary while introducing new mysteries that trace Black Catholic history.
*Please note that Dr. Gaddy’s prayers contain masculine language for God. While FutureChurch generally encourages the use of inclusive and expansive language, we have retained his original wording out of respect for his contribution and in deference to his spirituality.
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“As Christians, as Catholics, as people of faith, we must do more than just pray; we must model Jesus’ message to love one’s neighbor. Our neighbor cannot breathe! Our neighbor is being lynched! Our neighbor is dying! Our Red Record of Hate must end now!” – The National Black Sisters’ Conference
FutureChurch offers key selections on racial justice from Catholic Social Teaching, including excepts from documents by The National Black Sisters’ Conference, The Second Vatican Council, Black Catholic Bishops of the United States, the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
To learn more, download this resource packet. This resource includes:
“The goal for Black people has never been charity; it is full justice, human rights, freedom and the complete dismantling of white supremacy, beginning with the church.” – Shannen Dee Williams, Ph.D.
FutureChurch offers two articles from two leading Catholic Scholars – historian Shannen Dee Williams, Ph.D., and theologian, Rev. Bryan M. Massingale, Ph.D. – on racial justice along with questions for reflection and dialogue.
Shannen Dee Williams is the Albert Lepage Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. She is completing her first book, Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. In 2018, she received the inaugural Sr. Christine Schenk Award for Young Catholic Leadership from FutureChurch for using history to foster racial justice and reconciliation in religious congregations of women.
Bryan N. Massingale is the James and Nancy Buckman Professor of Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.
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“What does it mean to be Black and Catholic? It means that I come to my Church fully functioning, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become.”
Sister Thea Bowman, FSPA, was an extraordinary woman, who, throughout her life, confronted racism and worked to desegregate every corner of her world. Throughout her life, she and her African American community faced white supremacy and racial injustices, and as an adult, she challenged the Church to see that all people, regardless of race or culture, could not only live and work together in harmony, but worship together as well. She taught us what it truly means to be a “catholic,” or universal, Church.
Bertha Bowman, known to us now as Thea Bowman, was born in 1937 in a small segregated community in the deep South to Mary Esther, a teacher, and Theon Edward Bowman, a physician. Her parents were well respected in the Black community, but like all Blacks in the deep South, life was perilous in a world where white supremacy was vigilantly enforced in every aspect of daily life.
Thea’s grandmother was a noble woman who had been enslaved and overturning the cruel legacy of slavery was very much a part of Sister Thea’s unrelenting passion for racial justice.
To learn more, download our resource packet. Women Witnesses for Racial Justice resource packets include:
“My sole wish is to do the will of God.”
Elizabeth Clarisse Lange, later known as Mother Mary Lange founded the first community for Black women religious in the United States.
She had a profoundly tranformative impact on the life of the Catholic Church. Of French and African dissent she was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1784. Other oral traditions indicate she may have been born in Haiti. Her family fled the violence and uncertainty of the Haitian Revolution immigrating first to Cuba in one of Santiago’s French-speaking neighborhoods. During her childhood, she received an excellent education.
Sometime in the early 1800s Elizabeth and her mother Annette left their lives of relative wealth and comfort in Cuba to come to the United States. Her father did not join them. Although the reason for their departure is not clear, some speculate that the mother and daughter decided to leave in 1808 when the newly established government in Cuba required all non-Spanish citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the king of Spain. Mother Lange always identified herself as French – even to her soul.
They arrived in the United States at Charleston, South Carolina but only remained a short time before making their way to Norfolk, Virginia and finally to Baltimore, Maryland by 1813. Here Eizabeth made her home in the Fells Point area of the city where she felt at home amongst an already sizable community of fellow French speaking Afro-Caribbeans. Her mother, on the other hand, returned to the West Indies.
In the United States, Lange courageously faced multiple oppressions. First, she was a Black women in a white male dominated culture. Secondly, she was an immigrant and a Catholic in a nation where virulent anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movements were rearing up. Native-born Protestants, mostly in urban areas, felt threatened by the new arrivals. To many Protestants, the Catholic Church represented tyranny and potential subjugation to a foreign power. On a practical level, competition for jobs increased as new laborers arrived. As anti-immigrant and anti–Catholic feelings arose, nativist groups began to form in cities across the United States. Finally, Lange was a free Black woman in a nation where slavery was fiercely defended and religiously sanctioned and where Maryland, a slave state, resisted freeing slaves even after the Emancipation Proclaimation of Jan 1, 1863. It was not until November 1, 1864 that Maryland declared slaves free which was just a few months before Congress approved the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
To learn more, download our resource packet. Women Witnesses for Racial Justice resource packets include: