Black Catholicism

Abstract

This roundtable features six scholarly assessments of the historical and theoretical challenges that emerge when we consider the participation of African and African-descended peoples in the Catholic tradition. The subject of Black Catholicism is garnering new attention from researchers for several reasons. Although the presence of Christianity in West-Central Africa is usually associated with European conquest and colonialism, it is instructive to consider that the Kingdom of Kongo voluntarily adopted Christianity—specifically Catholicism—in the early 1500s as its official religion. In fact, the Kingdom of Kongo became an official diocese, operating under the auspices of Lisbon. From that point on, Catholicism played a central role in shaping the social fabric of Kongolese life by introducing novel religious practices and material cultures, by opposing or affirming preexisting cultural systems through ideology and institutions, and by participating in transnational networks of affiliation, travel, and intellectual formation.Scholars have also begun to appreciate that a significant minority of Blacks arrived in the Americas from West-Central Africa as Christian-identified peoples. Because Spanish and Portuguese colonialism proceeded under the official auspices of Catholicism, these colonizers organized civic and disciplinary institutions that frequently imposed Catholicism to one degree or another on free and enslaved Africans. For instance, the largest population of free Africans in the Americas during the seventeenth century lived in New Spain. There the Spanish monarch had instituted an inquisition that exerted control over the lives of Africans enslaved and free with considerable efficacy and often ironic consequences. We now know that many Africans manipulated the inquisition's requirement that subjects participate in heteropatriarchal marriage to create legitimate familial connections—their marriages were recognized in law and practice. In St. Augustine, the oldest colonial city in North America, Catholic Africans maintained an army devoted to making perpetual reprisals against British plantations in the Lowcountry. And in Brazil, African-descended peoples loyal to the expansive religious system of Orisha devotion have for centuries identified as loyal communicants of Catholicism. Although most Africans under Atlantic slavery were not converted to Christianity, those who did convert were overwhelmingly affiliated with Catholicism. This means it is not Protestantism but Catholicism that constituted the majority of Black Christian experience in the Americas, a pattern that still holds true today.There is at least one other major area of inquiry for which this roundtable has implications: the issue of Catholicism in the Americas or as a transatlantic phenomenon. Throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, during and after the period of Atlantic slavery under the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, most of the people who have lived their lives under the sign of Catholicism have been Native American and African descended, not European. Researchers will need to consider whether this fact requires any particular methodological or theoretical changes in the study of American Catholicism more broadly. As some of our roundtable authors explain, for instance, simultaneous participation in multiple religious traditions has been the rule and not the exception for African-descended people's historical involvement with Catholicism. This might have important implications for how scholars recognize what constitutes the Catholic tradition.We are pleased to offer this roundtable, and we invite our readers to consider the important questions and observations the authors offer for understanding the form and substance of Black Christianity in its global context.AbstractKeywords: Catholicism, kalunga, Kongo, Virgin Mary, South Carolina LowcountryI would like to begin by reorienting the present inquiry from the histories of Catholicism and Afro-Christianity to the histories of the African-derived religious cultures of the Atlantic diaspora. Of course, these two sets of histories have been intricately woven together since the fifteenth century, when people from Western Europe began to fully traverse the Atlantic Ocean and establish contacts and relationships with diverse societies in Africa and the Americas. The European presence in the Atlantic realm resulted in colonization and enslavement, as well as the spread of first Roman Catholic and then Protestant forms of Christianity. We may be tempted to presume that this latter process progressed inevitably in conjunction with the other developments and that the story of the religious past of the Atlantic diaspora is the story of African-descended people becoming Christians and in turn transforming Christianity in the Americas. This could indeed be the case if we decided to view this past through a teleological lens focused on explaining a Christianity-centered history of religious change. For much of the last five centuries, however, Christianity was not the center of the spiritual lives of African-descended people. Still, the enduring engagement with Catholic Christianity was and continues to be of fundamental importance to the religious cultures of people in certain regions of Africa and throughout the Atlantic diaspora. How do we explain this past without diminishing the choices that people made in shaping their religious cultures that included but were not defined by Catholic Christianity? How do we assess the meanings of Catholic Christianity to those African-descended people to whom Catholic ideas and practices mattered but who did not necessarily become Catholics? How do we respect the complexity and diversity of religious experiences without forcing those experiences into the exclusive categories of separate “religions” that often held less relevance to people of African descent than these categories do for us and our analyses?We can begin to answer these questions by remembering that the history of African-descended people's engagement with Catholic Christianity began with the immersion of Roman Catholicism in kalunga. At this point, I must note that I am taking some liberties with my use of this Kongo word. The term's most basic meanings refer to the visible physical domain of the sea as well as to the land of the dead, the invisible realm from which all forms of spiritual power emanate.1 When we integrate the entire semantic field of the word at one time, kalunga becomes an all-encompassing world comprised of the seen and unseen and inhabited by the living, the dead, and other entities that operate throughout. It includes “real” spaces and reflects established ideas and practices concerning spiritual matters, and yet it identifies neither a specific place nor a distinct religion in any of the senses that we usually attach to “place” and “religion.” For our purposes here, we can think of kalunga as both a geographical expanse and conceptual realm akin to the “Atlantic world,” though not quite the same thing. The “Atlantic world,” at its heart, is a Europe-centered construct both historically and intellectually in that it derived from the explorations and conquests of Europeans, and we tend to perceive it as a stage built especially for European expansions, including the spread of European Christianities, to play out on. I would prefer instead that we envision the physical and imagined dimensions of kalunga as the setting for the religious histories of Africans and their dispersed kin and progeny. Africans knew and lived within kalunga long before Europeans ever dreamed of crossing oceans, and kalunga remains long after Europeans claimed to have conquered its lands with their empires and converted its inhabitants to their cults. And when Europeans set sail in Atlantic waters to reach Africa and the Americas, they unknowingly immersed themselves and their religious cultures in the vast and deep realm of kalunga.Taking kalunga as our interpretive framework allows us to reimagine “place” and “religion” in ways that reveal less obvious patterns of engagement with Catholic Christianity than we have considered so far. Further, it locates our analysis first in West-Central Africa, where the formative stages of the immersion of Catholic Christianity in kalunga occurred, and then into the Atlantic diaspora, where captive West-Central Africans constituted the largest regional cohort of Africans taken to the Americas.2 It also requires us to reconceptualize the scope and scale of the religious encounters between Africans and Europeans. We must recognize that even in the earliest interactions in Kongo and neighboring societies, European Christians did not bring with them a whole Catholic Christian culture. At best, they brought only their individual understandings and experiences of Catholic Christianity, and try as they might, which some did as representatives of the institution, they could not transplant or replicate Catholic Christianity as it had developed in Europe. Their missions were made more difficult by the relatively small and transient number of European proselytizers of this foreign faith, an imbalance amplified further by the high mortality among missionaries. Ultimately, even with the support of certain Kongo heads of state and nobles, Catholic Christianity could not equal, let alone overcome, the immense dimensions of the fully conceived and lived West-Central African religious cultures that engulfed Catholic Christianity in kalunga.Yet Catholic Christianity did not have to equal or overcome local spirituality for Roman Catholic buildings, rites, beliefs, and holy people to become fundamental features of the spiritual landscape of Kongo and neighboring locales. Kalunga did not automatically reject novel influences, no matter how foreign, and could readily incorporate them without sacrificing its vitality and relevance for West-Central Africans. We can see the emplacement of Catholic Christianity in kalunga in the state of Soyo during the late seventeenth century. European missionaries acting under the authority of the prince of Soyo offered amnesty to local people who voluntarily disclosed their activities as worshippers of “idols” and presented their consecrated objects for public burning in an attempt to undermine the influence of “fetishers” (banganga, or spiritual experts). After destroying these “idols and other instruments,” the missionaries convened an assembly of those who submitted to this offer of pardon to determine the state of their acceptance of Roman Catholic doctrine and authority. The missionaries asked if the people wished “either to observe the laws of God or to observe their superstitious ceremonies.” They expressed their strong devotion to the Christian god and the teachings of the missionaries yet stated that they continued to value “their ceremonies and vain observances.”3 We could interpret this event and the insightful dialogue it provoked as a clash of religious cultures. From the Catholic Christian perspective provided by the European author of this account, this was indeed the case. But the words of the Soyo “converts” revealed something else. These individuals genuinely embraced Catholic Christianity at the same time that they retained fealty for the local religious culture. To the European missionaries, this was unacceptable. The Soyo “converts,” however, saw this as not only normal but also desirable. They needed neither to accept one and reject the other nor to blend them together into a new “creolized” religion (though this did happen in some cases). They simply created space in their physical and spiritual worlds for Catholic Christianity. Kalunga certainly evidenced ripples from the new presence of Catholic Christians, yet it readily absorbed the newcomers' rituals and spirits into the lives of the people who inhabited it.Interactions of this kind appear to have been quite common with the immersion of Catholic Christianity in kalunga. In Soyo in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, a Capuchin priest and local Catholic Christians held a large procession and celebration for Santa Maria that included vast offerings of legumes, manioc, millet, tobacco, eggs, fruits, and other produce of the land in honor of the return of a restored image of the “very Holy Virgin” to the church of Our Lady of Pinda. The event came during a severe famine that had already claimed many lives, but the people continued to add to the “extraordinary heap of alms offerings to Our Lady.” The procession and offerings had been intended to ask for rain in addition to rededicating the image to the chapel. The generosity of the suffering people was rewarded by a “prompt and abundant” rain that ended the famine and resulted in an unprecedented bounty in which the crops of millet rendered twice the normal harvest. This event became more remarkable with the appearance of the “pagans of the kingdom of Angoi located on the other side of the great river Zaire,” who joined in the proceedings as well. They brought their own offerings of food and cloth as they sought the healing powers of Santa Maria for sick people taken to the chapel.4The offering at Our Lady of Pinda answers some of the questions with which I began. We cannot classify it as a strictly Roman Catholic, Kongo Catholic, or “pagan” rite because it was all three simultaneously. Those who celebrated the offering came to it along different paths, some as converts to Catholic Christianity, others as participants in the blended religious culture of Kongo Catholicism, and still more as practitioners of local indigenous religious cultures. They arrived at the chapel following different paths and likely went back home along the same paths, having been satisfied spiritually without changing the ways by which they preferred to access the powers of kalunga. The chapel certainly stood as a Catholic Christian landmark, and the priest who led the observances no doubt conducted Mass and honored the Virgin Mary in complete accordance with the dictates of the church. Yet those who journeyed to the chapel, made their offerings, and celebrated with all the others gathered there did not need to embrace, reject, or blend with Catholic Christianity to create and take meaning from the event. The celebration and its outcomes just made sense within kalunga, as Santa Maria was clearly a powerful and benevolent nature spirit, the chapel was her shrine, and the European priest was the nganga of the spirit and her shrine.I contend that we should see this kind of engagement—convergence and concurrence—as far more common in West-Central Africa and the Atlantic diaspora than we have to this point, to see it as perhaps even typical.5 We need not expect the significance of Catholic Christianity in kalunga to have been defined primarily by large or influential groups of professing Catholic Christians, whether Roman Catholics or Kongo Catholics. Rather, we should be more aware of the presence of numerous West-Central Africans who were conversant to varying degrees with aspects of a Catholic Christianity immersed in kalunga but who did not necessarily translate this engagement into any formal or confessional expression of Roman Catholicism either in West-Central Africa or in the Atlantic diaspora.In any case, Catholic Christianity infused kalunga with words, images, concepts, and practices that would take on additional or alternative meanings after men, women, and children from West-Central Africa had endured the terrible journey from kalunga's eastern shores to its western shores. We cannot assume an uncomplicated movement of Roman Catholic or Kongo Catholic religious cultures to the Americas. There was simply too much suffering between one side of kalunga and the other for us to leap across the great water without considering the transformative nature of the experience. Further, the dispersal throughout the geographical expanse of kalunga presented new environments and contexts, some of which included strong Roman Catholic cultures and institutions and others that did not, particularly those places where Protestant Christianity prevailed among European colonizers. I would like to suggest that we resist the inclination to make our usual distinctions between Catholic and Protestant Christianities when assessing the engagements of African-descended people with Christianity in kalunga. The differences we typically assign to the divide between Catholic and Protestant Christianities, inevitably laden with the histories of “reformations” and wars in Europe beyond the cleavages based on theologies and doctrines, did not matter much, if at all, to captive Africans. When Catholic and Protestant Christianities were immersed in kalunga, they likely appeared far more alike than different to those unburdened by the baggage of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe and in European colonies. Even those who had extensive experience with Catholic Christian rituals and spirits would not have felt compelled to differentiate between them to a great extent or even to chose sides because spiritual life in kalunga did not require people to choose sides. Catholic and Protestant Christianities could be seen as equally valid means to access the spiritual power of kalunga.Nevertheless, we know that Catholic and Protestant Christianities evidenced differences, especially in certain features that we know held great significance to many Africans. Here is where we find the critical distinction that comes from recognizing kalunga as our framework. We are not so much concerned with the differences between Catholic and Protestant Christianities as expressions of Christianity as we are in the ways that captive Africans likely perceived Catholic and Protestant Christianities within kalunga. As such, any divergences in the religious histories of African-descended people in Catholic and Protestant colonies derived less from what those sects proclaimed themselves to be or what we understand them to be as institutionalized forms of Christianity than from the ways that African-descended people chose to engage what they saw or did not see in them as spiritually relevant, fulfilling, and valid. This is conditioned, of course, by our awareness that unlike Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity had a significant presence in West-Central Africa throughout the duration of the transatlantic trade and that many people taken from that region brought a range of engagement experiences with Catholic Christianity with them to the Americas. What happened when they arrived in European colonies where Protestant Christianity prevailed among the colonizers and enslavers? What influence, if any, did their engagements with Catholic Christianity have on the religious cultures they recreated in their new surroundings? We find answers to these questions in the early South Carolina Lowcountry.A large majority of the enslaved newcomers to South Carolina within the first two generations of its colonization had recent origins in Africa, and a significant number of them had an explicit affiliation with Catholic Christianity. People in this latter category carried Iberian names, which likely marked them as “Atlantic creoles” from West-Central Africa who played essential roles in seeding African-Atlantic cultures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 The presence of these “Atlantic creoles” allows us to imagine that other captive West-Central Africans who did not exhibit a Catholic Christianity identity but who nevertheless engaged Catholic Christianity in some sense numbered among the other enslaved Africans taken to the South Carolina Lowcountry in this time as well. Additionally, these groups of Africans with connections to Catholic Christianity were supplemented by swelling numbers of people indigenous to North America who had been taken as captives from Spanish mission settlements in La Florida by English raiders and their Native American allies during the early decades of the eighteenth century. The proportion of indigenous people integrated into the enslaved population peaked at 30 percent, almost all of whom were acquainted with Catholic Christianity in some form or another from their lives in the Spanish missions. Like the West-Central Africans brought to the Lowcountry, they appeared drawn to the convergence and concurrence of indigenous and European spirits in the veneration of the Virgin Mary above all other expressions of Roman Catholic practice.7 At the very least, the intermingling of numerous people of African and indigenous origin, both with histories of engagement with Catholic Christianity in other environments, compels us to contemplate how this circumstance shaped the formation of Lowcountry religious cultures over time.Our earliest view of this process comes from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Anglican missionary Francis Le Jau tended to Goose Creek parish and indicated in 1710 the existence “in this parish of a few Negro Slaves[,] … born and baptised among the Portuguese,” who “come to Church and are well instructed so as to express a great desire to receive the H. Communion amongst us.”8 He required these enslaved Catholics to “declare openly their Abjuring the Errors of the Romish Church,” most notably “praying to the Saints.”9 In the two-year period that Le Jau considered necessary for this “tryall,” it appears that some of the original “few” grew less desirous of becoming Anglicans, as only two remained so inclined.10 It may be the case that the rigid catechism and Protestant doctrine enforced by Le Jau antagonized these potential “converts” and discouraged their pursuit of becoming Anglicans. If we revisit the notion that they embraced a Catholic Christianity immersed in kalunga, however, we may interpret this encounter differently. While “praying to the Saints” may have been an issue of doctrinal contention for an Anglican missionary, it was a point of spiritual convergence and concurrence for many West-Central Africans, as we have seen at the chapel of Our Lady of Pinda. They were clearly receptive to the possibility of claiming an Anglican affiliation, most likely to add it to their religious identities rather than as a step toward choosing one side over another in the bloody contest that fractured European Christian communities. But the fact that Le Jau emphasized “praying to the Saints” as especially egregious among the “Errors of the Romish Church” may have led these enslaved Africans to reject the Anglican Christianity offered by the missionary, as it denied one of the most meaningful points of engagement with Christianity for West-Central Africans. We are not witnessing the repudiation of Protestant Christianity by Catholic Christians. Instead, we see in this instance inhabitants of kalunga rejecting a religious culture that did not support or augment their ability to live in kalunga. By restricting access to the array of spirits needed by the living in their everyday struggles and sufferings, Le Jau ensured the failure of the Anglican mission among enslaved Africans in the South Carolina Lowcountry, even among those for whom engagement with Christianity, in this case Catholic Christianity, mattered a great deal.This leads us to wonder about what remained by the end of the eighteenth century of this significant early presence of African and indigenous people who included Catholic Christianity in their religious cultures. It does not appear that a distinct, intergenerational Catholic subculture emerged within the enslaved communities of the Lowcountry, though some traces may have lingered in isolated instances.11 What did endure, however, was the understanding that the interaction with and reliance on spirits, particularly those associated with special places on the physical and spiritual landscape, provided meaningful sites of convergence and concurrence with Christianity. The renewal of this convergence and concurrence in the Lowcountry did not come until the nineteenth century, when African-descended people redefined the evangelical Methodist practice of “seeking” as a context in which to inject spirits derived from Kongo simbi spirits.12 Here we see the lasting legacy of the immersion of Catholic Christianity in kalunga. The South Carolina Lowcountry remained within kalunga for a very long time, as people of African descent there continued to call the sea “kalunga,” to find the “cymbee” (simbi) in freshwater springs, and to name the forest “feenda” (finda) for many generations after the first captive Africans arrived on the shores of the Carolina colony. In that sense, kalunga outlasted the Catholic Christianity that West-Central Africans brought with them across the sea. But the extensive engagement with Catholic Christianity in West-Central Africa stimulated the creation of a rich vocabulary and complex syntax for communication between religious cultures that allowed West-Central Africans to shape the spiritual dialogues between Africans, Europeans, and indigenous people in the Lowcountry, as well as in other regions of the Atlantic diaspora. The fact that we see this dialogue continue to flourish within the communities and religious cultures nourished by African-descended people throughout the Atlantic world testifies to creative power activated by the immersion of Catholic Christianity in kalunga.13AbstractKeywords: religion, healing, Mexico, confraternityWhen people think of African American Christianity, they may recall evangelical Protestantism in North America and the first Great Awakening. Or they may think about practices from the Caribbean and Brazil, such as Santería, Vodun, and Candomblé, which incorporate recognizable West African deities and West and West-Central African forms. Yet before Africans and their descendants developed these well-known forms of African-derived religion in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States, enslaved and free African Americans practiced Catholicism in the Spanish American viceroyalties of New Spain (present-day Mexico) and Peru, beginning in the sixteenth century. In Mexico, they practiced Catholicism in ways that were mainstream and that helped integrate them into colonial society. These religious practices were also distinctive and were tied to their own social circumstances and identities as African Mexicans.When I began researching the religious rituals practiced by African-descended people in Mexico, I hoped to find practices with clear ties to Africa like those in the Caribbean and Brazil. After all, syncretism is central to Mexican Catholicism, as Native Mesoamerican ideas about divinity and methods of communicating with the sacred are woven into Catholic practice all over the region. Early missionaries translated catechisms and confessionals into native languages such as Nahuatl and Zapotec, making the mixture of ideas and practices inevitable. I soon realized, however, that it is hard to see the relationship between African ideologies and Mexican Catholicism. This makes sense, of course, when thinking about demography: Mexico's population was overwhelmingly indigenous in the colonial period. Today the indigenous-descended, or mestizo, population predominates. Some scholars see West African roots in contemporary cultural practices on the Costa Chica, the coastal belt of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca where pueblos negros, or “Black towns,” have existed since the colonial period. Yet Laura Lewis has recently pointed out that many of these practices attributed to Africans, including those connected with religious ideas about fate and the soul, are similar to local indigenous practices. She also raises thought-provoking questions about why we are so eager to see these connections, arguing that this “Africa thesis” serves to place Black Mexicans outside of constructions of the Mexican nation of which they are a part.1If it is difficult to find traces of Africa in contemporary Mexico, what about the colonial period, when the African and African-descended population formed a small but significant percentage of the overall population, especially in cities? Colonial mainland Spanish America renders for us a history of African American Christianity and broader ritual practices that differ significantly from those of the Caribbean, Brazil, or British North America and the United States. There are structural reasons for this difference. Unlike these plantation societies, which themselves differed in terms of size and demographic ratios, the majority of enslaved and free Africans in New Spain lived in urban areas. They did domestic and artisanal work, which meant that they lived and worked alongside Spaniards, Native Americans, and members of the large category of mixed-race people known generally as castas, sharing cultural practices and forming families with members of these different groups. Even when enslaved Africans worked on Mexican sugar plantations and haciendas, they worked alongside indigenous and mixed-descent laborers, some of whom were fulfilling tribute obligations and others of whom were wage laborers. Thus, cultural and religious practices mixed along with physical bodies.Demography played an important role in the development of African Mexican religious practices in that, unlike regions centered on large plantations, Africans did not form the majority of the population in New Spain. Europeans did not transport enslaved Africans to mainland Spanish America in the numbers that they did to the Caribbean and Brazil. Together, the Caribbean and South America received about 95 percent of all enslaved Africans. New Spain received about 110,000 captives, in the sixteenth century from the Senegambia and in the seventeenth from West Central Africa. This was a fraction of the overall trade, estimated at about 12.5 million captives. Furthermore, the trade to New Spain ended around 1