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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2018
This contribution will examine several theological methods used to understand morally egregious examples of historical dissent in the Catholic Church. From the 1600s to the late 1800s, large numbers of Catholics in the young United States dissented from the Holy See in one particularly egregious manner: their support for and defense of chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. While chattel slavery is universally declared horrific and immoral, its vestiges have not been erased from church history, nor has its influence been eradicated in the modern experience of Christians in the United States today. After naming the contemporary problem caused by this historical example of dissent and analyzing theological approaches to ameliorate this problem, I will propose a theological-historical approach that may offer better solutions in the future.
56 Pope Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus, 1839; quoted in Zanca, Kenneth, ed., American Catholics and Slavery: 1789–1866 (New York: University Press of America, 1994), 27Google Scholar (the decree); also see 221–25 for comments from a consultor to the Sacred Congregation of the Index on the decree.
57 E.g., Zanca, American Catholics and Slavery, 128–29, 191–94.
58 Quoted in Caravaglios, Maria Genoiro, “A Roman Critique of the Pro-Slavery View of Bishop Martin of Natchitoches, LA,” American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia Records 83 (June 1972): 67–82Google Scholar.
59 Caravaglios, “A Roman Critique,” 71; Zanca, American Catholics and Slavery, 219–25.
60 “Immaculate Conception Catholic Church,” http://www.natchitoches.net/attractions/historic-district/immaculate-conception-catholic-church/.
61 Furthermore, how can we look back on Gregory XVI's condemnation of slavery and not consider how the papacy directly supported the origins of the slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a fact that Gregory's encyclical did not mention?
62 Obviously, these three categories are not all-inclusive and have many exceptions, but I find them helpful for the present analysis.
63 This assertion is based on the commonly employed conception that past scholarship is redeemed through holy interpretations, despite the source. A relevant example would be the continued incorporation of Martin Heidegger's ideas in contemporary theology, including through Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, despite the fact that Heidegger's ideas were deeply twisted around notions of Nazism, bias, and antisemitism. See Martin Heidegger, Ponderings: Black Notebooks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016–17).
64 While many aspects of Tracy's corpus cover this topic implicitly, Tracy addresses the topic directly in five articles from 1997 to 2005: “Fragments and Forms: Universality and Particularity Today,” in The Church in Fragments: Towards What Kind of Unity, ed. Ruggieri, Giuseppe and Tomka, Miklos (London: SCM Press, 1997), 122–29Google Scholar; “Fragments of Synthesis: The Hopeful Paradox of Dupré’s Modernity,” in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupre, ed. Casarella, Peter J. and Schner, George P. SJ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 9–24Google Scholar; “African American Thought: The Discovery of Fragments,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone's “Black Theology and Black Power” (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 29–38Google Scholar; “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 170–84Google Scholar; “Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God,” in The Concept of God in Global Dialogue, ed. Jeanrond, Werner and Lande, Aasulv (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 98–114Google Scholar.
65 Tracy, “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times,” 179.
66 Ibid., 179–80.
67 Tracy, “Fragments and Forms: Universality and Particularity Today,” 125–26.
68 Tracy, “African American Thought,” 37–38. Tracy argues, for example, that “no major African American thinker, long before the rest of us, ever attempted or wanted a system. They have left us, all of them (especially James Cone … Cornel West … and Toni Morrison …) with something far more valuable than a system. They have left to us fragments that break and undo such pretense to totality, and that describe hints and guesses of hope… . These are the crucial resources which African-American thought, if heeded, can provide for our desiccated public realm.”
69 Hopkins, Dwight N., Being Human: Race, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 16–23Google Scholar. Hopkins uses the analogy of a discussion forum to argue that Tracy allows new voices to the table, but does not allow the voices the ability to change the table, the method of discussion, the language, or the key vocabulary terms (20). One could respond by arguing that Tracy meant only to elevate certain positive aspects of the Enlightenment and not to require the underlying modern or postmodern method en masse, but Tracy's essays do not lend themselves easily to this response.
70 Many others inhabit this rich ressourcement, but two examples would be Hayes, Diana, Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012)Google Scholar and Hopkins, Being Human.
71 Copeland, M. Shawn, “Foundations for Catholic Theology: Bibliographical Essay,” in Black and Catholic: The Challenge and Gift of Black Folk, ed. Phelps, Jamie (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), 155Google Scholar.
72 There are many examples of this approach already in print today, but I find M. Shawn Copeland's approach to Lonergan, Bernard and Metz, Johann Baptist in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010)Google Scholar to be exemplary of this idea.