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Essential Readings on Racial Justice

Written on . Posted in Women Witnesses for Racial Justice.

“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.

To learn more, download our resource packet. This resource includes

  • Articles
  • Questions for reflection and conversation

Download

Sister Thea Bowman

Written on . Posted in Women In Church Leadership, Women Witnesses for Racial Justice.

“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:

  • Biography/Essay
  • Questions for reflection and conversation
  • Original art by Chloe Becker
  • Prayer Service
  • Suggestions for taking action in your community

DOWNLOAD

Mother Mary Lange

Written on . Posted in Women Witnesses for Racial Justice.

“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:

  • Biography/Essay
  • Questions for reflection and conversation
  • Original art by Chloe Becker
  • Prayer Service
  • Suggestions for taking action in your community

Download

Sister Antona Ebo

Written on . Posted in Women Witnesses for Racial Justice.

“I am here because I am a Negro, a nun, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness…. I’m here today because yesterday [in Saint Louis] I voted.”

On Sunday March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and local police beat and bloodied civil rights activists who had begun a 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. Immediately following the “Bloody Sunday” attack, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. issued a call for church leaders around the country to come to Selma and to join in the struggle for civil rights.

On March 10th, Sister Antona Ebo, a Franciscan Sister of Mary, took off from Saint Louis, Missouri to Selma on a chartered plane that she joked had been pulled out of mothballs. The March 11th cover of The New York Times featured a photo of Sister Ebo marching alongside other protesters. That photo would become an iconic image of the struggle for voting rights.

Throughout her life — both before and after Selma — Sister Ebo, who died in 2017, was a civil rights pioneer. She credited the Holy Spirit for guiding her throughout her life and often sang the black spiritual, “I’m Gonna Do What the Spirit Says Do” whenever she talked to audiences about her experience in Selma and the ongoing struggle for racial justice. Indeed, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, may be the only explanation for how Sister Ebo ended up in Selma

To learn more, download our resource packet. Women Witnesses for Racial Justice resource packets include:

  • Biography/Essay
  • Questions for reflection and conversation
  • Original art by Chloe Becker
  • Prayer Service
  • Suggestions for taking action in your community

Download

Artist: Chloe Becker. Comissioned by FutureChurch. 

Women Erased: Patriarchal Constructs of Women in the Bible and Lectionary with Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D.

Written on . Posted in Women Erased, Women In Church Leadership.

Hebrew Bible Scholar, Rev. Wil Gafney., Ph.D., argues that the overwhelming majority of Christians receive their scripture mediated through a lectionary. Lectionaries are not simply as androcentric as are the scriptures, but women are even less well represented than they are in the biblical text. To the degree that biblical texts function as scripture for religious readers, it ought to be possible to tell the story of God and God’s people through the most marginalized characters in the text. Though the bible is an androcentric document steeped in patriarchy, a women’s lectionary should demonstrate and grapple with the gender constructs of the text rather than romanticize heroines.

2021 Mary of Magdala Virtual Liturgy

Written on . Posted in Mary of Magdala, Women In Church Leadership.

FutureChurch celebrates the 2021 Feast of St. Mary of Magdala. Our virtual liturgy, “Mary of Magdala and Many Others: A Global Celebration of Catholic Women,” was led by Lucy Rieger with preaching from Kayla August. Read by FutureChurch participants from all over the world, our “Litany of Naming” helped us learn about seven Catholic women engaged in amazing ministries and provided participants an opportunity to lift their own names.

Download the Worship Aid

 

 

Dr. Christine Axen on Zoom

2021 Mary of Magdala Art Tour

Written on . Posted in Mary of Magdala, Women In Church Leadership.

Medievalist, Dr. Christine Axen, Ph.D. offers a presentation entitled “Un-Erasing Mary of Magdala: Scenes of the Crucifixion.”

Dr. Christine Axen is a medievalist with a specialization in French religious history and female religiosity in the Middle Ages.  She received her doctorate from Boston University, and currently teaches at Fordham University in New York.