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.

In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI published In Supremo Apostolatus, which forbade “any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever … opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter.”Footnote ⁵⁶ While abolitionist groups gladly accepted the letter, most Catholics in the United States did not.Footnote ⁵⁷ Among those who dissented openly was Bishop Auguste Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana, who issued a pastoral letter as late as 1861 praising slavery as “the manifest will of God.” Catholics must continue, he argued, “snatching from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Martin's opinion was not unique—his letter was reprinted by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, and his opinions were shared by bishops, priests, and laypersons throughout the American South and North.

Despite the fact that Bishop Martin was reprimanded by Rome for this letter in 1864, he was not removed from his bishopric.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead, he continued to direct a growing seminary and missionary field; he traveled to Rome and voted in the First Vatican Council, and he accompanied Pope Pius IX during his 1871 visit to New Orleans. After Martin's death in 1875, his tombstone was laid to the right of the altar at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and remains there today. The website of the diocese and basilica lists no connection of Bishop Martin to slavery, nor does the national record of historical landmarks in Louisiana. The basilica, instead, houses the Bishop Martin Museum, a regular stopping point on the historical tour of this southern Louisiana city.Footnote ⁶⁰

I offer Martin not as unique but emblematic of the problem being examined in this roundtable. How can we look back on millions of Catholics who supported the institution of chattel slavery in direct opposition to the pope—at least after 1839—but in complete agreement with countless bishops and priests around the United States?Footnote ⁶¹ How many parishes and universities of the United States, not to mention theological faculties and centers of study, reaped the economic benefits of centuries of a societal structure that enslaved, raped, dehumanized, and slaughtered millions upon millions of children, women, and men? Dissent is not only a problem of the present but one that involves a proper theological interpretation of a difficult past. Of the many attempts to understand such historical events, modern theological approaches can be organized into three general methods.Footnote ⁶²

First, and more popular than one might expect, is a “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach. The fact that modern Catholic theology was created almost entirely by white European men does not call the theology itself into question, just the men who created it. Catholic theology, argues this approach, is not inherently racist or misogynist and thus can still be considered wholly systematic because, quite simply, God works through imperfect vessels.Footnote ⁶³ The critique of this approach is well known: theological arguments constructed by persons complicit with systematic oppression necessarily contain significant traces of, if not outright arguments for, said oppression. Culture and method, theological or otherwise, exist in a symbiotic relationship, for better and for worse.

The second theological approach to a sinful past is a popular postmodern argument of fragmentation represented best by David Tracy in the 1990s. Leaning on Walter Benjamin, Tracy argues that “the fragments of life embedded in [Benjamin's] kabbalistic readings of Messianic Judaism … gave hope, not resignation” to modern thought.Footnote ⁶⁴ Benjamin's fragments become “hints of redemption,” which reveal “through the fragmentary form itself the brokenness and falseness of modern experience and the obfuscation of all singularities in the nineteenth century's deceptively continuous modern bourgeois experience.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Through his repudiation of “any totality system whatsoever,” Tracy argues that we can “blast the marginalized fragments of the past alive with the memory of suffering and hope” and “remove them from their seemingly coherent place in the grand narratives we have imposed upon them.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This approach attempts to allow the Catholic theologian to “admit our present polycentric Catholic situation [and find] … our best hope for creating a new unity-in-diversity.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite the benefits and progressive nature of such a position, Dwight Hopkins has argued against applying Tracy's framework to African American theology.Footnote ⁶⁸ Tracy's characterization of scholars from historically oppressed groups as fragments, Hopkins argues, disallows the construction of any theological system that rivals and challenges the European narrative. Despite assurances to the contrary, any argument for a piecemeal insertion of subversive voices seems masked beneath an assumed hierarchy of a white dominant culture against which all other cultures must be measured.Footnote ⁶⁹

The third theological-historical approach is marked by a theological reclamation of Christianity through historically oppressed sources. The Africanist theological ressourcement, argued by such esteemed theologians as Diana Hayes and Dwight Hopkins, exemplifies such reclamation of Christian theological traditions through close studies of African and African American practices and stories.Footnote ⁷⁰ Womanist Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland sees this method as one “decenter[ing] racial critique, without abandoning it.”Footnote ⁷¹ Africanist arguments like those of Hopkins and Hayes—and many others—are integral to pushing past the limitations of Tracy's fragmentation, as the dominant narrative of postmodernity itself is challenged by African– and African American–based alternative theological conceptions of race, class, culture, and faith.

I find this third argument extremely hopeful, but still only part of the answer. Growing up Catholic in southern Louisiana, I am personally well aware of the long effects of proslavery Catholicism on generations upon generations of Catholics, and the long history of complicity between racism and American Catholic culture. As such, I propose to categorize a fourth approach to the historical problematic, which I call “the negation of history as sacred tradition.” Like the traditional systematic argument, this theological approach allows for possibilities of methodologies of grace within the dominant European narrative. Furthermore, like the fragmentary hypothesis, it recognizes the limitations of dominant methodological frameworks and calls for a breaking and reorganization of the past. Unlike Tracy's method, however, it follows the Africanist approach in arguing that such breaking can be done only if it can lacerate the structural and methodological narratives that define the Western European impact on sacred tradition today.Footnote ⁷²

Practically, following the example of Bishop Martin, this approach would declare not that Martin is necessarily damned, but that his history of power and preaching can never again be claimed as an aspect of sacred tradition. Perhaps Martin's grave is moved outside the basilica, or perhaps alongside Martin's grave a plaque reminds the faithful of the millions of black persons in southern Louisiana who have suffered directly from Martin's words. Martin's person was not incapable of holiness, but his legacy must be deemed incommensurable with the development of sacred tradition. His influence undeniably supported and continued the horrific philosophical and theological arguments of racism and antiblackness that have persisted to this very day.

On a wider practical level, this theology of negation demands the implementation of historical truth commissions in every diocese around the country. It demands that all Catholic educational institutions—not just Georgetown University—acknowledge their complicity in racial inequality and work practically to overcome lingering biases. Such a theology of negation claims that we can neither wash away nor leave behind a corrupted past. Our only hope of salvation is to confront it, and its theological descendants, directly. It is easy to remember only those who dissented for the cause of righteousness and liberalism. But until we as a church can directly confront the negative effects of dissent, such as the widespread support for chattel slavery in nineteenth-century American Catholicism, we cannot hope to understand the intricacies of dissent in the twenty-first century. As long as theology relies on problematic approaches to historical sins, the oppressed voices of the past will continue to haunt the church of the future, driving believers and nonbelievers away from the hope of the Body of Christ.