Being One Church: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future

“It's very difficult to be open to not only truth-telling, but to receiving other people's truths,” moderator Dr. Amy Uelmen said as she opened the second panel of the 2022 Catholic Partnership Summit.

Pope Francis has called the People of God to unity. Yet, as many gathered at the Summit — as well as the Catholics who took part in the diocesan phase of the Synod — have acknowledged: There remains much that still divides people of faith.

Noting the first panel’s emphasis on the importance of listening as leaders, Uelmen, a professor of law at Georgetown University, challenged the second panel to consider the other side of listening: sharing or speaking one’s truth. And to explore how engaging in listening, sharing, and collective discernment serves to promote unity in the Church.

“What does it look like to face down some of our painful conflicts and areas of disagreement and get into this practice of truth-telling when this is so complex?” she asked.

The second panel of the Summit featured Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv., Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, and Bob Bordone. The panelists discussed our call to Being One Church, sharing a mix of lessons from history and considerations of future actions to help unite us as Catholics.

A Listening Church

For many Catholics, the ongoing Synod process is the first time they have felt heard. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released their synthesis report in mid-September and noted that among the more than 700,000 Catholics who took part, many felt it was the first time the Church really listened to them, even as they shared and raised many wounds and conflicts within the body of Christ.

“As I experienced in the sessions held in the Diocese of Lexington, people everywhere were surprised by the great amount of agreement they discovered when they actually listened to each other and heard what was being said,” remarked Bishop Stowe, who is the bishop of the Diocese of Lexington.

Many who have felt heard for the first time by the Church in the Synod process are those who have experienced being actively excluded and harmed by the Church in the past.

“When people are reduced to labels, causes, and statistics, they’re easy to characterize and even easier to dismiss,” Bishop Stowe said. “The unity we desire in the Church should not be confused with uniformity. Diversity is a blessing. It is what makes us genuinely Catholic.”

Learning from the past

Dr. Williams, an historian who studies the experience of Black Catholics in the United States, encouraged leaders to look at what is happening today to reconcile with those harmed in the past as they seek to build bridges and work toward unity.

Williams is the author of “Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle.” Her book shares the more than 15 years of research and oral history interviews she conducted to unearth, understand, and tell the story of Black sisters in the United States.

“I was a budding historian of the African American experience, and one thing that I'd already known was that one of the greatest weapons of White supremacy was its ability to erase the history of its violence and its victims,” she said. And the Church had, for decades, buried the truth about Blacks in the faith and in religious life.

Williams shared that she, a cradle Catholic, had no idea before she began her research that Black sisters both not only existed, but once led ministries in her hometown of Savannah, GA. It wasn’t until she found a 1968 article announcing the formation of the National Black Sisters Conference that she had ever seen a Black sister outside of fictional Hollywood films.

“I was able to recover a voice of a group of Black American Church women whose lives, labors, and struggles have been systematically ignored, routinely dismissed as insignificant, and too often, reduced to myth,” Williams said.

She said she also found that the truth of Black sisters’ lived experiences didn’t align with the existing narratives of American Catholicism and the story of Catholic sisters in the United States.

“Instead, from a host of widely-ignored archival sources — civil church records and out-of-print books, periodicals and over 100 oral history interviews — I bore witness to a profoundly unfamiliar history that disrupts and revises much of what has been said and written about the U.S. Church and the place of Black people within it,” she said.

Williams’ research revealed a history of Black women denied their call to religious life because of their race; of Black sisters starting their own religious orders and a conference so they could live out their vocations; and of Black sisters actively working to desegregate religious life in the United States.

“When you are confronted with the silent past, the greatest responsibility of the historian and the most radical thing any person can do is to tell the story that was never meant to be told,” she said. “And in that journey, and what I have seen in my own work has been not only discovering the power of Black historical truth-telling and Black Catholic historical truth-telling, but also a profound grief, a profound unity of grief, not only between Black sisters who have suffered the sins of racism in our society, but also profound grief on the part of White sisters who been complicit in that history.” the heroes and heroines who responded.

Williams said we will never know how many vocations were lost or the depth of the harm experienced by the Black community, and that is why history matters. But she questioned those inflating the current divisive climate in the Church as somehow worse than the divisions of the past.

Not only did her research reveal the truth of U.S. Black sisters but also revealed untold stories of White bishops speaking out against the sin of racism and calling for reparations for the Black community, particularly women, harmed by the Church and of White priests fighting to get Black schools accredited. Her research also led to women’s religious orders, which previously denied Black women access, undertaking a process of reconciliation and making reparations.

Conflict and the Holy Spirit

Pope Francis teaches that our differences and even our conflicts are not to be feared, Bishop Stowe said.

“We can't really be one Church if we aren't able to have disagreements in a civil and constructive manner,” he said. “We certainly can't be one Church if decisions that affect everyone are put to a majority vote, if we ignore the misgivings of the minority, much less if a

“Is it?” she asked. “It is worse than slavery or, like, Jim Crow?”

Williams suggested that within the horrific stories of the past are also the stories, and blueprints for action, of hand-selected few decide for all. Much less can we be one Church if we sweep our differences and difficulties under the rug, as we did with reports of abuse, as we continue to do with systemic racism, as we have with our policies of exclusions, so painfully felt by women, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and so many others.”

Bordone, conflict resolution expert and founder of the Cambridge Negotiation Institute, posited that “Conflict is where the Spirit is working.”

“I would say that being one Church means having conflict,” he said. “It means embracing conflict.” mean-spirited and harsh. Asserting one’s experience in a way that others actually hear and listen to takes time, energy, and skill, Bordone said.

“As long as, institutionally, we do not create conditions that allow for the surfacing of differences — whether that’s for a queer person, or a divorced person, or a woman, or a person of color — it’s going to be even harder in our Church to see conflict resilience,” he said. “We need to find a way, as a Church, to make it safer for people with different experiences to speak their experience. And I think when we do that, we learn about richness and we learn about the way in which the Spirit is working.”

Bordone detailed how the Church has a history of responding to national and global conflict with solutions that have endured. He noted the formation in 1909 of Catholic Charities to serve the record number of immigrants coming to the U.S. and how it continues to be one of the largest providers of social services today. And he spoke of the formation in 1943 of Catholic Relief Services to provide for the millions displaced by World War II and how it continues to serve those in need across the globe.

The current polarization in the Church and the world could be the next catalyst for Catholic action, he suggested.

Bordone encouraged leaders to develop what he calls “conflict resilience.”

Talking about disagreement in authentic ways, even if it doesn’t result in resolution is a key part of conflict resilience, he said. So is assertion, though sometimes assertion can come across as tepid and hesitant, or as

“What if in this moment, our bishops with our support started the U.S. Conciliation Service?” he suggested. “Using the great wisdom we have in this room and the resources, we could build something that I think could really, fundamentally transform this Church and our society.”

Mutual Vulnerability

Through examples of his past work with dioceses, Bordone said that unity can often be found when both parties are open and vulnerable. When the Church or its leaders only listen and do not make themselves vulnerable by also sharing their stories, their “listening” is perceived as not genuine.

“If we are going to enter into this process, in the next step, it can’t just be one-way listening, there needs to be mutuality of sharing of stories and of suffering and challenge and joy and goodness,” Bordone said.

Williams cautioned that not everyone will yet be in a place to be open and vulnerable but we do not need to wait for everyone to be ready to start having the conversations. Sharing the example of the Black sisters in their struggle to get their schools accredited, she said that not every White sisterhood was willing to help them out, but three or four were and that was all they needed to get started.

“The reality is, it’s going to be messy,” she warned. But she offered this hope to those who are engaging in the work to address conflict and seek unity: “Courage comes from the Holy Spirit.”