in the poor can be only a close-minded ideology.80
For well over forty years, Cone has persistently stated that African American sources and black agency are essential for achieving racial justice within societal and ecclesial realms. Any Christian theology that lacks these two ingredients cannot properly be called theology since it does not take seriously God’s central work of liberation in the United States in the twenty-first century. Whites can play a role in liberation if they are willing to give preference to African American sources and the notion of black agency in their theologies. The theologians below, whether black or white, have all been influenced by Cone’s call to make black theology a priority.
M. Shawn Copeland
M. Shawn Copeland, unlike the other Catholic theologians I am examining, is a systematic theologian, as opposed to a moral theologian. As such, her emphasis is on formulating a coherent framework of the Catholic faith that accounts for racism, as opposed to proposing a theology of racism along with adequate responses. She retrieves the stories of black men and women for the purpose of putting forth a more accurate synthesis of Christian belief and practice. For Copeland, who is African American, the reality of Jesus Christ in the flesh paved the way for making use of black bodies as a theological resource. The embodied spirituality of Jesus has anthropological ramifications that can be further identified in the suffering of others.81 Not being an ethicist, she rarely examines either the structural or systemic underpinnings of racism, though she is cognizant of this aspect of racism. Her understanding of racial justice is grounded in the doctrines of the Trinity and the imago Dei: “The creativity of the Triune God is manifested in differences of gender, race, and sexuality.”82 Racism, and particularly the enslavement of black women, is “the attempt to degrade the imago Dei . . . through commodifying, objectifying, and sexually violating black women’s bodies.”83 The tortured and mutilated body of Jesus Christ on the cross, which has eerie similarities to the lynching tree, should jolt Christians out of their stupor and awake them to the plight of African Americans.84
Copeland submits two requisite steps to address racism and oppression: (1) anamnesis, or remembering the stories of the oppressed, and (2) solidarity. Through the mindful knowing of the oppressed, Christians will realize how the situation contradicts the Christian message and be moved to compassion. This compassion should elicit concrete acts of solidarity, which she defines as taking on “responsibility” for the oppressed at a personal risk. Actions of solidarity are a meaningful modus operandi for following and imitating Christ. In other words, “a praxis of solidarity for human liberation . . . make[s] the mystical body of Christ publicly visible in our situation.”85 For Copeland, the mystical body of Christ has interpersonal, ecclesial, and soteriological implications that she believes speak doctrinally to her notion of solidarity.86
Copeland is the author of a short book on the life and vision of Henriette Delille (1812–1862), which she originally delivered as the 2007 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality. Delille, who could very well become the first American-born black saint, was the founder of a religious order for black women, the Sisters of the Holy Family, around 1842 (they were originally known as the Sisters of the Presentation).87 Copeland’s introduction to Delille occurred in 2004, when Archbishop Hughes of New Orleans appointed Copeland to sit on a theological commission to evaluate Delille’s writings. She found in Delille an example of a black woman “acting as a moral agent, who, through discernment and prayer, intellectual and moral acumen, resourcefulness and, often, resistance, exercises her essential freedom in order to realize the integrity of her life.”88 As a free black woman in New Orleans, Delille was expected to participate in the extralegal system of plaçage, in which free black women became mistresses of white men of means. Instead, she “exposed the timidity of the church” by founding a religious order that dedicated itself to the education of free black people and slaves.89 In Delille, Copeland recognizes a black woman who did not “submit to ecclesiastical indifference . . . [but rather] exercised her intelligence, creativity, and moral agency in a preferential option for despised enslaved blacks, the poor, aged, and infirm . . . [following] the path took [by] Jesus of Nazareth to the outcast, marginalized, and poor.”90
Copeland pieces together a theological portrait of Delille by combining her few writings with her lived “praxis.”91 Delille wrote of her desire to “live and die for God”; according to Copeland, religious life provided Delille with the “liberative” avenue to avoid plaçage and dedicate her life to God as well as to free and enslaved people of color.92 Copeland argues that religion was the impetus for a “crucial mediation of black personal and communal transformation,” leading Delille “to the possibilities of self-transcendence in the midst of the direst circumstances.”93 By choosing religious life, Delille chose a degree of autonomy and self-determination over her own body for the purpose of giving priority to her spiritual life. For Copeland, the experiences of Delille point to the reality that “Christian witness demands an engagement with bodies, not their denial; a struggle with history, not surrender to it.”94 Within this context, she expands the definition of experience to include “the differentiated range and interconnections of black women’s religious, racial, cultural, sexual, legal, and social (i.e., political and economic) experience.”95 Copeland’s book on Delille has similarities to this book, but her project was more focused on the aim of demonstrating the contribution that Delille could make to systematic theology instead of Christian ethics.
Retrieval of African American sources is integral to Copeland’s theological project as well as her analysis of white supremacy and privilege. She argues that only by exposing the ugly reality of racism to the light of day will Christians be moved to adequately realize the evil of racism and be provoked to oppose it. Within her theology of racial justice, she utilizes the horrific, inspiring, and faithful lives of African Americans—particularly women—to inform and expand the understanding of many traditional Catholic doctrines. Although she offers no explicit role for African Americans in confronting racism today, it was not the purpose of her project to suggest specific responses to racism for whites or blacks. Instead, she remembers the stories of many brave African American women from the past in order to inspire all Catholics to acknowledge and reflect on racial injustice in their own context and to follow the example of Christ in living a practice of active solidarity.
Bryan N. Massingale
Bryan N. Massingale, who is the only black Catholic ethicist that I will examine, has published multiple articles on racism, and in 2010 he published a comprehensive book on the issue, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church. Massingale wrote his dissertation on the social dimensions of sin and reconciliation in the theology of James Cone and Gustavo Gutiérrez. He believes that “there is a valuable and essential contribution that the black experience—the experience of creating meaning and possibility in the midst of the crushing ordinariness of American racism—can make to Catholic faith and theology.”96 Since racism is in some manner connected to practically every justice issue in the United States and is still largely
