The Good, Segregationist Catholics: A Meditation on John R. Connolly’s “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression”

For this final installment of Horizons’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration, the editors have chosen to reprint John R. Connolly’s 1999 article “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression: Black Theology’s Challenge for American Catholic Theology.” Connolly wrote this article because he had been reading (or perhaps rereading) God of the Oppressed, a systematic theology that had been published by Black Protestant scholar James Hal Cone almost twenty-five years earlier.¹⁶⁴ In essence, Connolly asked, “Shouldn’t white Catholic theology prioritize liberation too?” Having originally appeared in Horizons’s twenty-fifth anniversary volume, Connolly’s article now reaches its own twenty-fifth birthday and stands at the midpoint of the journal’s history. Reflecting on the achievements and limitations of “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression” can help white Catholic theologians to critically evaluate our collective commitment to Black liberation.

Connolly grew up in the United States in the postwar era, when whites were utilizing the practices of de jure segregation and lynching to maintain white supremacy. In Cone’s description of the southern whites of his youth, Connolly recognizes his own white Alabama Catholic family’s historically segregationist behavior. When reading Cone’s words, he says, “I saw myself.”¹⁶⁵

Connolly recounts specific practices demonstrating his family’s explicit commitment to de jure and de facto segregation. They obeyed statutes requiring racial separation in schools and public facilities and attended Sunday Mass only with other whites.¹⁶⁶ Connolly also remembers their relationship with Marylam, their Black maid. He reports that Marylam did the Connolly family’s cleaning, ironing, cooking, and childcare, including such intimate tasks as bathing and caring for the children during parental absences.¹⁶⁷ He reflects, “At the time it seemed to me that we treated Marylam nicely and that we loved and respected her.”¹⁶⁸ For example, “She ate well when she was at our house. We gave her food and clothes to take home, as well as presents at Christmas and Easter, and other holidays. It seemed as though she was a part of our family. But,” he explains, “it was clear she was not considered an equal member. She never ate at the same table with us and, when we gave her a ride home, she sat in the back of the car.”¹⁶⁹

In retrospect, this mundane aspect of Connolly’s white Catholic upbringing strikes him as troubling. Recalling that “we all considered ourselves to be good Catholics” and that this sentiment was confirmed by religious sisters, the parish priest, and the archbishop, Connolly asks, “What type of gospel was preached to us which allowed us to condone and support a situation that oppressed millions of black people? Was there something wrong with our theology?”¹⁷⁰ Connolly grasps that something was amiss not only with his family’s behavior but with their theology of revelation, their sense of God’s guiding presence in their lives.¹⁷¹ This important insight is not only intellectually disconcerting but affectively painful: “My presumption of my family’s moral virtue was shattered.”¹⁷² Connolly laments what he now perceives to have been a devastating moral failure: “How could we have believed that as segregationists we were nonetheless good Catholics?”¹⁷³

Connolly’s retrospective outrage notwithstanding, such beliefs were common. Historian Matthew J. Cressler has illuminated white Catholic racial attitudes during the postwar era, when Marylam worked for Connolly’s family.¹⁷⁴ Through archival research analyzing hundreds of letters that white Chicago Catholics sent to their bishops between 1965 and 1968 protesting archdiocesan plans for integration, Cressler documents how white Catholics conflated their racial and religious identities. The Chicago letter-writers assumed a continuity of virtue between being “real good and sincere Catholics” and practicing segregation.¹⁷⁵ Far from expressing any hint of moral conflict, they asserted confidently that racial segregation was the will of God.¹⁷⁶ The Connollys, then, were not unusual, and anti-Blackness was not confined to the South. It was and remains a white problem.

Grappling with his dismay over the ease with which his white Catholic upbringing had endorsed segregation, Connolly extends his insight to his chosen theological profession. Given his new perspective on his family and faith community, it now strikes Connolly as “interesting”—a word my mother used to use, in a certain tone, when she was deeply skeptical of something—that mainstream theology of revelation, including the paradigmatic work of Avery Dulles, omits “the category of liberation from oppression” as part of God’s will for humanity.¹⁷⁷ Connolly not only affirms that this omission creates “an obstacle to overcoming racism in the United States,” but he suspects “that this theology might function as a contributory cause of the racism that exists among US Catholics.”¹⁷⁸ In a word, though he does not say so directly, Connolly realizes that white theology itself is segregationist.

To his credit, Connolly does not shake his head in despair, heave a regretful sigh, and move on to a less dismal topic. Nor is he deterred by the institutional church’s open antagonism toward liberation theologies.¹⁷⁹ Determined to intervene, he undertakes careful research. His resulting proposal for developing a white Catholic theology of revelation informed by Cone’s insistence on the urgent need for Black liberation becomes Horizons’s first peer-reviewed article to engage substantively with Black theology and to hint that anti-Blackness is a serious theological problem.

Compatibility and Transformation

It does not take Connolly long to comprehend that conventional theology is ill-equipped to solve this problem. Mirroring whites’ segregation-era insistence on occupying the front seats of public and private vehicles, the dominant white theological method dictated that Connolly first examine white theology of revelation and then ask what Cone’s ideas might add. Moreover, Cone himself had asserted that white theology of revelation, lacking the category of liberation, was not so much wrong as “inadequate,” so weak that “even a racist could accept this theology of revelation.”¹⁸⁰ Connolly could have tokenized Cone by treating his ideas as optional or supplemental to white theology. Instead, he considers Cone’s thought in its integrity, striving to interpret it on its own terms.

Connolly’s investigation leads him to grant the validity of Cone’s argument that God’s self-revelation is liberation and, consequently, to challenge Dulles’s thought-system to incorporate Cone’s insight. Noting a recent conservative turn in the trajectory of Dulles’s thought, Connolly observes that Dulles himself is unlikely to incorporate “the category of liberation from oppression into his theology of revelation.”¹⁸¹ Fortunately, another influential “American”¹⁸² theologian, Francis Fiorenza, has already advocated for “contemporary Catholic theologians to consider the ‘hermeneutical role of the oppressed’ in their paradigmatic reconstruction of the Christian tradition for today.” Further, Fiorenza identified “the significance of liberation theology for systematic theology today.”¹⁸³ Thus, Connolly can conclude on behalf of white theologians generally that “an inclusion [of the category of liberation] would be compatible with an American Catholic understanding of revelation.”¹⁸⁴

But Connolly does not stop at declaring compatibility. That language still implies that incorporating this theme into theology is optional rather than crucial. Instead, Connolly calls for transformation. He offers a new definition of revelation that prioritizes liberation: “Revelation is ‘God’s symbolic communication of liberating and reconciling love which rejects all forms of oppression.’”¹⁸⁵ With this definition, Connolly not only accepts Cone’s insight about the need for liberation for Black people but insists that this insight must shape white Catholic theological reflection if that reflection is to be “adequate,”¹⁸⁶ that is, if it is to stop endorsing segregation and begin to champion liberation. Moreover, he proposes that “a living faith commitment to work to overcome oppression should precede any theological reflection.” He explains:

Liberation cannot simply be an idea added to the concept of revelation. The notion of revelation should include an active commitment to social transformation. In this way the oppression of blacks and others would be explicitly denounced and American Catholics would thereby become involved in the work of overcoming the social, political, and economic structures of United States society that support oppression.¹⁸⁷

To embrace Cone’s insight and hold white theologians accountable to it is to assert Black theologians’ right to shape the field. Connolly’s argument gestures toward the audacious step of relinquishing white theology’s historical insistence on its exclusive authority to determine the scope and parameters of the discipline. To champion liberation, white theology must renounce its commitment to segregation and racism. Demonstrating awareness of liberation theologies in footnotes or brief passages—merely acknowledging compatibility—is not enough. The entire white theological approach requires transformation. This is a step that white Catholic theology collectively, including the field as represented by Horizons, has yet to take.

Today, the academy concedes the relevance of Black theology (as evidenced, for example, by the recent proliferation of job openings prioritizing this specialization), and anti-Black racism is increasingly acknowledged as a theological problem, including in Horizons. It would be a stretch, however, to say that “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression” opened the journal’s floodgates. When I first met him in 2006, Connolly remarked to me that he had tried to bring attention to Black theology with this Horizons article, but no one seemed to have noticed.¹⁸⁸ Receiving no response, he went on to other projects.¹⁸⁹ As far as I could ascertain, the present roundtable constitutes the first time since its publication that “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression” has been mentioned in Horizons, and citations elsewhere are scant.¹⁹⁰ By contrast, Brown, Gutiérrez, and Schneiders are recognized as giants in the fields represented by their respective fiftieth-anniversary-celebration articles; in particular, Schneiders’s featured article “has become a classic and is the most cited article of the Horizons corpus.”¹⁹¹ This begs the question: Why have Horizons’s editors chosen as fourth in their catalog of “greatest hits”¹⁹² an article that until now has had virtually no measurable scholarly impact?

It seems that the editors wished to encourage theological reflection on anti-Black racism—in their words, they recognized that “we need to keep working on the challenge of Black theology”¹⁹³ —and Connolly’s 1999 article was the best Horizons’s archives had to offer. I say this not to criticize Connolly’s valiant effort but to offer a matter-of-fact explanation. There was nothing older. Since the journal’s inception in 1974, Black theology had been mentioned in passing and occasionally discussed in book reviews but, as noted, Connolly was the first to engage it at length. Afterward, six years passed before Christopher Pramuk’s article on the theology of M. Shawn Copeland appeared in 2005, along with a brief “editorial essay” in which a senior scholar reflected on his own white privilege.¹⁹⁴ A ten-year gap followed¹⁹⁵ before Katie Grimes published an article on Peter Claver and white supremacy in 2015, Michael Jaycox published an article on the Black Lives Matter movement in 2017, and Lincoln Rice published an article on racial justice and the Catholic Worker movement in 2019.¹⁹⁶ At the time of the watershed events following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, then, Horizons’s treatment of Black theology and anti-Blackness consisted chiefly of a smattering of articles by early–career white scholars.¹⁹⁷

Recently, it appears that the editors have successfully directed more energy toward this topic, generating a surge in invited contributions on themes related to Black theology and anti-Black racism. In 2021, Horizons published a roundtable on teaching and antiracism; in 2022, an editorial essay on race in late antiquity; and, in 2023, a roundtable on white womanhood.¹⁹⁸ No further peer-reviewed articles appeared, however, until 2024, when the June issue included two: one by Cyril Orji on the Joseph story and contemporary race-discourse and the other by John P. Slattery on racism in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin.¹⁹⁹ What this brief literature review reveals, pun intended, is that the architects of this fiftieth-anniversary celebration could not choose to reprint an article on Black theology or racial liberation by a giant in the field because Horizons has never published one.

For many white Catholic scholars, this journal’s fine achievements in numerous areas represent a source of pride. Our shared commitment to excellence now compels us to admit that race is not one of those areas. The dominance of white voices in Horizons generally, the scarcity of voices treating Black theology and anti-Black racism, and the fact that so few of the relevant peer-reviewed articles and invited essays are authored by Black scholars—this evidence indicates that, at best, the theological community represented by Horizons operates according to a compatibility model. Regardless of our intentions, the impact is clear: Horizons continues to practice racial exclusion. Meditating on this sobering lesson, I invite white theologians to join me in lamenting with Connolly: How can we have believed that as segregationists we are nonetheless good Catholics?

White Theology

Our lament must not yield to despair. Connolly’s experience suggests that there is hope even for senior white scholars. After all, Connolly achieved his insight into the segregation of theology when he was almost thirty years into his career. It is also worth noting that he began his research using a conventional white theological method; he was a Dulles scholar long before he comprehended Cone’s relevance to his work. Yet, when he decided to advocate for Cone’s liberationist priorities to shape white Catholic theology of revelation, he became the scholar who broke Horizons’s silence on Black theology and anti-Blackness.²⁰⁰ At the time, his colleagues ignored him; a generation later, the editors have plucked his article from obscurity to ignite what may turn out to be a robust and ongoing discussion of white Catholic responsibility for anti-Black racism.

Connolly’s work in “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression” models the initial attempt of a white Catholic theologian to describe how their own racialization as white has shaped their life and thought. Integrity demands that we white theologians follow his example. Exhorting “white American Catholic theology to begin to work to overcome its social situation and to respond to the challenge presented by black theology,”²⁰¹ Connolly offers a word of caution that remains instructive today:

An American Catholic theology of revelation cannot claim to be speaking for blacks, women, the poor, Native Americans, U.S. Hispanics, or any other oppressed peoples. It must see itself as speaking primarily to white American Catholics who find themselves on the side of the oppressor and in support of unjust and oppressive societal structures.²⁰²

In addition to refraining from speaking for others, white Catholic scholars also must learn to speak for ourselves. This requires coming to grips with a more personal truth, one that Connolly could scarcely bring himself to name: Not only do we speak primarily to white Catholics who oppress, we speak primarily as white Catholics who oppress. Our “social location” is that of “oppressor.”²⁰³ This is the realization that shattered Connolly’s “presumption of [his] family’s moral virtue,” and of his field’s as well.²⁰⁴

One white theologian who has begun to process this realization constructively is Maureen H. O’Connell, who is currently working at LaSalle University in her home city of Philadelphia. In her recent book Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of Catholic Anti-Blackness, O’Connell investigates her white Philadelphia Catholic family’s complex history of immigration and assimilation. At times, contemplating the details of her ancestors’ participation in white supremacist social dynamics causes her to feel profound regret. It is no easy task “to probe the wounds that whiteness inflicted upon [my ancestors] and attend to the damage and hurt that reverberates down the generations and beyond the branches of my family into the wider Body of Christ.”²⁰⁵ Rather than shy away from this pain, however, she metabolizes it to develop a deep theological understanding of Catholic anti-Blackness. She models how white Catholics can take responsibility for cultivating “racial mercy,” by which she means “a willingness to enter into the chaos of racism,” “reject the empty promises of whiteness,” and “accept our remarkable status as God’s beloved.”²⁰⁶ If we are sincere, then we will take action: “Racial mercy gives us the empathy and courage to get down to the reckoning work of justice.”²⁰⁷ O’Connell purposefully drives her lament toward transformation.

White theologians have long referred to Black theologies, womanist theologies, Native American theologies, Latinx theologies, mujerista theologies, LGBTQ+ theologies, and Asian American theologies, to name a few, as forms of liberation theology. It is time we accustomed ourselves to describing our own work as white theology, a form of oppressor theology.