In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement’s resurgence after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a group of Ignatian ministers in the Washington, D.C. area, who had already been gathering for prayer and spiritual conversation for five years, found themselves wrestling with a difficult but necessary question: How were they, both personally and communally, complicit in systemic racism? They wondered if the spirituality that had shaped their lives for so many years could help them grapple with the sin of anti-Black racism within the Church and beyond.
Rooted in the conviction that Ignatian spirituality has the power to illuminate even the hardest realities, they turned to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, trusting that God’s grace could reveal their hidden complicity in individual and systemic racism, help them grow in interior freedom, and lead them toward conversion and transformation. Out of this prayerful discernment emerged the "Setting Captives Free: Racism and God’s Liberating Grace" retreat—an Ignatian-informed process designed to confront racism through prayer, reflection, and communal accompaniment.
Setting Captives Free (SCF) invites participants into a five-week journey of sacred listening and spiritual conversation. Participants commit to thirty minutes of daily prayer with scripture, often through Ignatian Contemplation or Lectio Divina. Readings, meditations, speeches, and additional resources accompany these prayer experiences. They gather weekly in racially specific groups (BIPOC and white-identifying) of four to six people for 90-minute sessions of courageous, Spirit-led sharing facilitated by experienced leaders. The spiritual community that forms embodies vulnerability, openness, and attentiveness to how the Spirit is moving in the midst of their sharing.
Drawing from the pattern of the Spiritual Exercises, each week invites participants to pray for a specific grace. Asking for a grace–a gift from God–helps the retreatant focus their desire. This request includes an “I and We” lens that moves the retreatants beyond individualism and self-reliance and into solidarity with one another and with the wider Body of Christ. The retreat begins where Ignatius begins: with an experience of God’s unconditional love for the retreatant and all creation. Only after being grounded in this love do participants ask God to reveal their complicity with sinful social structures that support and express racism. This shift, from beginning with self-analysis to beginning with openness to what God desires to reveal, is fundamental to the design of the retreat. It does not absolve responsibility. Instead, it deepens truth-telling, humility and the freedom to respond authentically.
The third week focuses on humility and contrition for participation in these harmful social structures. Humility, essential for sound discernment, keeps the focus on how God is at work instead of allowing retreatants to become stuck in self-condemnation or self-protection. In the fourth week, participants pray for the grace of God’s ongoing transformation and liberation from the ways they participate in and enable racism. They also ask for wisdom and courage to transform sinful structures. The final week gathers the graces of the journey, inviting retreatants to receive them, to savor them, and to live each day out of those graces under the guidance of the Spirit.
Since its creation, more than 150 people have entered into this retreat, confronting racism not only as a social problem, but as a matter of spiritual conversion. In December 2022, Fr. Brian McDermott, SJ brought the retreat into a broader theological conversation during the Dahlgren Sacred Lecture, "The Spiritual Exercises and America’s Original Sin". In many ways, Setting Captives Free embodies the spirit of the Universal Apostolic Preferences (UAPs), especially the call to “show the way to God through the Spiritual Exercises and discernment,” and to “walk with those whose dignity has been violated in a mission of reconciliation and justice.” The retreat offers a pathway by which individuals and communities can encounter Christ in ways that transform both hearts and structures.
For institutions shaped by Ignatian spirituality, this work carries particular urgency. Georgetown University’s own engagement with its history of enslavement and its legacies underscores the need for such spiritually grounded formation. As the university and other Catholic institutions continue to respond to the moral imperative of reckoning with the American Catholic Church’s original sin of anti-Black racism, building a foundation of spiritual resources for the journey ahead is imperative. Institutional reparations require not only moral courage and financial resources, but what might be called spiritual capital: a Spirit-led conviction, grounded in humility, to participate in God’s movement toward restorative justice.
If Ignatian spirituality in the American Catholic Church is to remain credible in our time, especially in light of the sin of racism, it must become a wellspring of spiritual capital necessary for what Pope Francis, in his encyclical letter Dilexit Nos, described as “restoring goodness and beauty to our world.” Setting Captives Free challenges participants to move beyond passive awareness and into the abundant flow of God’s liberating grace, a grace that deepens conversion needed for the work ahead. Ignatian spirituality, especially the Spiritual Exercises, can and must become a communal force for racial repair capable of transforming the Church and, indeed, much more.
