Confessions of a White Catholic Racist Theologian
Jon Nilson/CTSA Convention
"Catholic theology, in order to be truly Catholic theology in the United States, must be worked out in conversation with black theology," Jon Nilson, a theologian at Loyola University of Chicago and outgoing president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, said in his presidential speech June 8 in Cincinnati to the CTSA annual convention. Nilson said: "There are many good reasons for white Catholic theologians to have marginalized black theology. But these reasons are 'good' in the sense of explanatory. They are not 'good' in the sense of exculpatory. They are not good enough to refute the charge of racism, however benevolent our racism has been." Nilson said that white Catholic theologians are not racists "if racism means night riders, lynching, cross burning and race riots" and not "if racism means simply the attitudes, words and actions of individuals who discriminate openly and consciously against others on the basis of their skin color." But, he continued: "What if racism is more pervasive and subtle? What if racism is more a system than a symptom?" He said: "There is a type of racism peculiar to us white Catholic theologians. It consists of ignoring, marginalizing and dismissing that body of theological insight and challenge born of the black struggle for justice, black theology." Four factors were "chiefly responsible for the racism of white Catholic theologians" in the United States, said Nilson. First, the realities of segregation. For example, he said, urban residential segregation "guaranteed that few Catholics - and few Catholic theologians - would have a friendly relationship with a black person." The second factor was the ideal of integration. Here, for example, "racism was framed as an affliction of individuals, not a systemic social dysfunction." A sense "that the assimilation of blacks into the mainstream ... would take place automatically" was also seen. Third was the impact of Vatican II in the United States: "The century's defining moment for the Roman Catholic Church came precisely at a defining moment in the black struggle for justice in this country and during the birth and early years of black theology. Catholic theologians had good reasons to be preoccupied." The fourth factor, said Nilson, was the style of early black theology itself. Nilson's text follows.
In the following remarks I am trying to respond to three challenges. The first one comes from our soon-to-be president, Shawn Copeland. She asks:
"How are we theologians to speak God's word in these times? How are we to understand our theological vocation? How are we to offer what we have to the struggle for authentic human liberation from within our culture? How shall the next generation of theologians remember us and the age in which we have come of age? Shall we be shamed into confessing that our shoulders sagged in recognition of the cost of truth? Shall we surrender our most cherished principles and values to expediency? Shall we be forced to admit that the cost of our own religious, moral and intellectual conversion was too steep? What do our times call on theologians to become?"(1)
The second challenge is a question from James H. Cone. Its barb is even sharper. Cone says: "Racism is one of the great contradictions of the Gospel in modern times. White theologians who do not oppose racism publicly and rigorously engage it in their writings are part of the problem and must be exposed as the enemies of justice. No one, therefore, can be neutral or silent in the face of this great evil."(2)
We Catholics are among these silent white theologians, and Cone summons us in particular to account for ourselves. "What is it," he asks, "that renders white Catholic ... 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?"(3) For Cone, a real theologian cannot choose whether or not to confront racism. "Racism is a profound contradiction of the Gospel.... [Therefore] any theology that does not fight white supremacy with all its intellectual strength cancels its Christian identity."(4) How, then, do so many of us manage to see so clearly that classism and sexism destroy the credibility of any Christian theology, yet fail to see that racism does the same?
The third challenge comes from Jamie Phelps and appears in the December 2000 issue of Theological Studies. This issue was devoted to the theme, "The Catholic Reception of Black Theology." The authors of its articles are well known to us; in fact, most of them are members of this society: M. Shawn Copeland, Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale and Jamie Phelps herself. Reading their studies shows that the issue could have been more accurately titled "The Catholic Marginalization of Black Theology." This point is made most sharply by Phelps when she describes white Catholic theological silence thus: "The silence of U.S. Catholic theologians about racism is parallel to the silence of leading German theologians and intellectuals during the Nazi atrocities and prosecution of the so-called 'final solution' against the Jewish people."(5)
If ever there were a sentence that seems to come right off the page and seize the white reader by the throat, it is this one. It demands a response.
An initial reaction might well be to dismiss Phelps' claim as rhetorical overkill, a tactic to get whites to pay more attention to issues that she thinks are important. But that is a reaction born of ignorance. Her comparison of white Catholic theologians to the German theologians is more than justified by Basil Davidson's conclusion that the slave trade "cost Africa at least 50 million souls";(6) it is more than justified by the extremes of suffering endured by the kidnapped Africans and their descendants for 244 years of legalized slavery;(7) it is more than justified by the 71 years of oppression and discrimination known as Jim Crow; more than justified by the 51 of those same years during which one black person was lynched about every 2.5 days somewhere in the United States "at the hands of persons unknown";(8) and more than justified because racism continues to infect our country today.
The German theologians under National Socialism are an easy target for criticism and condemnation. They can provide illusory reassurances of our moral superiority. But Phelps' analogy says if you want to see someone who has failed to meet the responsibility of being a Catholic theologian when it comes to one of the greatest, if not the greatest, moral issue of our nation, look in your mirror. For decades, Johann Baptist Metz has borne the burden of being a German Catholic theologian in the "Christian" nation that gave birth to Nazism,(9) but we have no one like Metz among us. No U.S. white Catholic theologian has likewise taken on the burden of racism. Very few white Catholic theologians (except for Rosemary Radford Ruether, William O'Neill, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel McGuire and David Tracy) seem to have noticed, much less published responses to black theology.
Page 2: Are we white Catholic theologians racist?