Black Liberation Theology And Black Catholics: A Critical Conversation

Theological Studies, Dec, 2000 by James H. Cone

A GROUP OF PROGRESSIVE White Catholics invited me in July 1983 to speak at a national conference on "Voices of Justice: The Challenge of Being Catholic and American in the 1980s."(1) I hesitated because most Whites, including liberal Christians, do not want to hear a radical race critique of their religious and secular institutions. They do not mind a mild reprimand as long as Blacks assure them that everything is all right. I could not do that. Blacks and Whites cannot have an honest dialogue about racial reconciliation without an active struggle for racial justice.

I decided to focus my reflections on the failure of White Catholic theologians to address White supremacy as a theological problem. I placed the Catholic Church in America in the same boat with its Protestant counterpart. Both are racist institutions whose priests, ministers, and theologians seem to think that White supremacy offers no serious contradiction to their understanding of the Christian faith. While racism is America's most radical and persistent sin, White Catholic and Protestant theologians are virtually silent about its pervasiveness in seminaries, churches, and every segments of the larger society. How people could claim to be Christian theologians in 20th-century America and not engage this country's original sin--racism--truly astounds me.

Like White Protestants, White Catholic theologians show no indications that they will end their conspicuous silence in the 21st century. Both are following a White tradition of nearly four centuries of silence. They were silent during 244 years of slavery and a 100 years of legal segregation and "spectacle lynching." With few exceptions, White theologians were also silent during the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Instead of probing the theological meaning of the Black struggle for justice and White resistance to it, they focused their intellectual energies on the theological alternatives provided by Barth, Bultmann, and Rahner together with an emerging variety of antifoundational postmodernist thinkers.

WHITE SUPREMACY AND BLACK CATHOLICS

I have been writing about this silence for 30 years but White theologians still refuse to talk about White supremacy as a theological problem. They act as if they do not see racial oppression or hear the Black cries for justice. They must think either that racism is not a serious problem or that it is outside of the realm of theological discourse. How can that be since the reality of White supremacy is so obvious and Black protests against it so loud and persistent? If White theologians can see how the failure to engage anti-Semitism, classism, and sexism can destroy the credibility of theological discourse, why are they so blind to the poison of racism that corrupts Christian theological discourse? What is it that renders White Catholic and Protestant theologians silent in regard to racism, even though they have been very outspoken about anti-Semitism and class and gender contradictions in response to radical protest?

While White Catholics have been mute, Black Catholics have a long history of vocal resistance against racism--beginning with the Negro Catholic Congresses in the late-19th century and Federated Colored Catholics in the early-20th. In the late 1960s and early 1970s organized protests among Black priests and sisters began. Black Catholic clergy and scholars made racism in the Church and society the central focus of their pastoral and theological work. "A Statement of the Black Catholic Clergy Caucus" (1968)(2) and Lawrence Lucas' Black Priest/White Church (1970)(3) defined the early militancy of the Black Catholic voice with their blunt attack on racism in the Catholic Church. These were followed by the pioneering work of the late Joseph Nearon of John Carroll University and the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, which initiated a collective effort toward the creation of a Black Catholic theology. The proceedings were published in 1978 as Theology: A Portrait in Black(4) The symposium led to the creation of the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans. In 1984, Black Bishops issued a pastoral letter on evangelization entitled What We Have Seen and Heard (1984), urging Black Catholics "to share the gift of our Blackness with the Church in the United States."(5)

In the late 1960s, I met Lawrence Lucas in the context of the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) and was deeply moved by his militant commitment to blackness and his passion for racial justice. Joseph Nearon invited me several times to speak on Black liberation theology at John Carroll University. We spent many hours talking about the need to develop a Black Catholic theology. Moses Anderson (now Bishop) and I had similar conversations during my many visits to Xavier University. I encountered Shawn Copeland, Jamie Phelps, Tionette Eugene, and others in the context of the Black Theology Project of Theology in the Americas (TIA) and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). They impressed me most by their intellectual commitment to explore the theological implications of what it means to be both "truly Black and authentically Catholic." Additional talks with Edward Braxton (now Bishop) and Diana Hayes further revealed the great intellectual promise of Black Catholic theology. I also spoke at several Black Catholic seminars, conferences, and religious gatherings during the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, and other cities. These events and persons placed me in dialogue with many Black Catholics who revealed significant limits in the Protestant perspectives on the Black Church and Black liberation theology.