In the summer of 1991, when the world was watching Nelson Mandela receive an honorary doctorate in Jamaica, I was preparing for another summer at the Institute for Black Catholic studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. The institute was established at the only Catholic HBCU to assist those who would minister in the African American Community.
The liberation of Nelson Mandela focused the world's attention on the situation in South Africa. We marveled at how a political prisoner of 30 years would focus on healing instead of vengeance from the oppressive regime of apartheid. It felt like springtime for racial justice and the beginning of a new world order. Many of us went to New Orleans that July in the hopes that we were on the verge of something new.
That summer, I was enrolled in Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.,’s class on Black Catholic History. He had just published his book, A History of Black Catholics in the United States, and he was walking us through the chapters of his text with wisdom and insight. The second chapter of his book, “A Church in Chains,” chronicled the Church’s historic involvement in slaveholding. At the heart of this chapter was the Jesuit Order, which founded its U.S. mission on the backs of enslaved labor and the sale of human life. I remember how my excitement for Mandela and his call to prophetic change was suddenly dampened by these painful pages of Jesuit history. Apartheid in South Africa was not the only human injustice still begging for mercy and healing.
In 2016, we had another serious awakening to racial justice. Rachel Swarns published her article on the living descendants of Jesuit slaveholding in the New York Times. While the truth of Jesuit slaveholding was not new to us, the legacy of our historic sin suddenly came to life. I was no longer responding to racial justice on another continent or in another century; I was face to face with the Descendants of our historic sin. Reading her painful account of our past, I realized that I was no longer on the outside looking in. I would have to consider the sin of our past and respond with truth and justice.
In his final encyclical letter, Dilexit nos, Pope Francis offered a way to repair past sins and restore what has been lost. He cited The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, particularly Saint Ignatius’ teachings on desires. Pope Francis saw in Loyola a unique insight into repair and restoration. Often, our sins are rooted in disordered attachments and desires. If we but “rearrange” our life’s goals and desires, we might open the door to true healing and reconciliation.
A year after Swarns’ landmark publication, I stood before hundreds of Descendants and national press at Gaston Hall on Georgetown’s campus. I was asked to offer an apology for Jesuit slaveholding. Relying on the same spiritual wisdom that Pope Francis invoked at the end of his papacy, I said, “Saint Ignatius Loyola mandates that each Jesuit pray for the grace to examine in his conscience so that he might feel interior knowledge of his sins, feel the disorder of his actions, and, hating these, pray for the grace to correct himself.”
While these words may seem pious and distant from the work of racial justice, I believe that they are at the heart of authentic repair. Just as apartheid in South Africa and the oppression of Nelson Mandela were rooted in disordered attachments and desires, so too the plight of persons enslaved and sold by Jesuits was rooted in the same disordered attachments. Until we name this truth and address it, we risk sidestepping the real work of racial justice.
The harsh reality is that a Jesuit attachment to wealth and capital corrupted those Jesuit missionaries who relied on slave labor. When we sought to monetize human life instead of liberating it, we disordered our life and mission. While much of this is relegated to the past, it was not until I met the living Descendants of our enslavement that I understood how much the past affects the future. Part of “rearranging” the disordered is listening to the plight and the pain of living Descendants.
In my first encounters with living Descendants, they shared their feelings of betrayal and shame. They also expressed their desire for hope and healing. Some of them said to me, “We know you are ashamed of your past, don’t be ashamed of how you address your future.” There is a crippling inertia that can accompany reconciling with the past. One can almost behave like a deer in the headlights, always afraid of not getting it right. Descendants were less interested in dwelling on the past and more interested in partnering on constructive ways of repairing the future.
In my ongoing work with Descendants and now with the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, I know that we should never make the perfect an enemy of the good. The work of rearranging desires and ordering my actions toward justice requires commitment and risk. It means that we’re not always going to get it right. But until we step out and act, we will not have healing and reconciliation.
When Saint Ignatius Loyola talks about “ordering our desires” he is really uplifting the value of human freedom. Freedom, for Saint Ignatius, was not understood as building walls and borders; freedom came from knowledge and purpose. If we are to free ourselves from disordered attachments, we must embrace the truth of our past. Once we do this we can respond to the present with courage and love. I believe that Nelson Mandela responded to the horrors of apartheid with truth and love. The Descendants of Jesuit enslavement, with whom I partner and work, have responded to me with truth and love. I pray for the courage to do the same.
