Berkley Center

The focus of this Berkley Forum announces a spiritual activism as the legacy of Pope Francis. At Jesuit and Catholic institutions—of both education and worship—we need to hear Pope Francis’s call to reparation in a particular way, attuned to how Catholic institutions created the evil that we now seek to repair. Sins of racism, economic exploitation, and Christian supremacy devastated whole populations who had been racialized as other-than-White. As historian Shannen Dee Williams reminds us, the Catholic Church was the first and largest corporate slaveholder in the Americas. In the brokenness of settler-colonial practices through which an American government stole the cultures and religions of indigenous people, Catholic educators were at the forefront of this work. And in the effort to restore the beauty of justice in light of economic disparity, Catholics—and Catholic institutions—have stood on both sides of the struggle. How do we undertake the work of repair as Catholic and Jesuit institutions, when we ourselves have been part of the problem as much as part of the solutions? 

Such a question allows us to actively address the real sins of White supremacy and racism not as problems “out there” in some other geographical location or past actions, but sins with which we are intimately entangled. This is because our institutions are the storehouses of illicit capital gained through these past injustices: stolen land, stolen lives, and stolen labor helped to create the institutions which shelter us today. How do we heed Francis’s call for repair when we live in homes haunted by the ghosts of past harms and infused with illicit benefits delivered through the sins of White supremacy? 

Saint Ignatius’s contemplation on sin in the first week of the exercises might be at least one place to start. This is both in a general sense of being willing to dwell on our failings but also in the more particular approach Ignatius takes to an accounting that resists the desire to put the sin of White supremacies and racism ‘out there’ in the world without locating our relationship to it. The rich imaginative angle of Ignatius’s thought-experiments, coupled with the strategic tabulation of specific failings could be a spiritual practice worth pursuing as we attempt to situate ourselves in specific locations of responsibility. 

In the second exercise of the first week, as a meditation on our sins, Ignatius calls for a “court-record” attuned to geographic and relational specificity, which we can tailor to the reparative work at hand. This rendering of Ignatius proposes:

I will call to memory all the sins [of White supremacy and racism] of my life, looking at them year by year or period by period. For this three things will be helpful: first, the locality or house where I lived; second, the associations which I had with others; third, the occupation I was pursuing.

Ignatius’s attention to locality moves us immediately to the question of the land on which we stand both personally and institutionally. What sins of White supremacy wrested this land from the original inhabitants? What devastation has been buried in the ground by broken treaties from which our institutions benefitted? Ignatius’s meditation is insistent on requiring that we keep an accounting of these sins so as to genuinely experience sorrow for them. It is only with contrition that we might move to the commitment of repair.

The spiritual attention to homes in which we’ve dwelt also propels us to contemplate our histories in relation to the U.S. practices of redlining. If we survey the geography of our Catholic, Jesuit homes as Predominantly White Institutions in this era, will we recognize benefits accrued through the racist practices of mortgage lending and racialized assessments of land values? Developments of digital tools—like the website, “Mapping Inequality”—provide resources at our fingertips to take seriously the past practices of history that shape the institutions we inherit today. 

The second exercise of the “First Week” moves from location to associations and occupations. Here, Ignatius opens a way for us to enter the contemplation of sin through the doors of our voluntary associations in Catholic churches and schools. We may think of these institutions as doing God’s good work in the world, bringing forth expressions of beauty that the heart of Christ desires, but since we know so many of our Catholic institutions reaped benefits from an economy of enslavement, shouldn’t a full accounting of this history be a prerequisite for the claim that we are working with God toward repair? 

As we’re invited into these contemplations, we’re activated to know our personal and institutional histories, and the illicit benefits conveyed through them from the past. There is plenty of precedent for such truth-telling about our histories in the various memory and reconciliation projects across Catholic and Jesuit institutions. But, this truth-telling is only the first step, it must be followed by analyzing those histories (to understand where past practices are perpetuated in present racisms), grieving those histories (to account for the real harms that have been done) and repairing the brokenness that has resulted from those histories.

Knowing our personal and institutional histories, guided by Ignatius’s methodical accounting, can help us to be grounded in taking responsibility for the results of racism not just “out there” in the nation but “in here”—within the institutions in which we study, earn our livelihood, and attempt to meet God and others.