WASHINGTON — More than 150 attendees from around the country gathered Saturday at the Catholic University of America for the inaugural Sister Thea Bowman Conference, celebrating the life and legacy of the internationally known Black Catholic nun. The Mississippi-born preacher, teacher, and CUA alum is now on the path to sainthood.
The free event, held under the theme “I Bring My Whole Self,” was sponsored by the school as well as the Black and Indian Mission Office and a number of Black CUA alumni.
Fr Maurice Nutt, a Redemptorist priest who serves as diocesan liaison for Bowman’s canonization cause, was the keynote speaker. In his remarks and a subsequent dialogue with CUA President Dr. Peter K. Kilpatrick, Nutt shared his experience of being mentored by Bowman during her decades of national ministry.
“Describing Thea as faithful and free is by no means an oxymoron or incongruent,” he said, referencing his 2019 biography of Bowman, which served as an official component in the early push for her sainthood.
“She was both all at the same time. She could love her friends and challenge her friends. She could love her Church and challenge her Church.”
Known as a vaunted evangelist, scholar, and musician in the African-American tradition, Bowman bucked various trends in mid-20th-century Catholic religious life. These included her increasingly national platform, her embrace of African garb following the Second Vatican Council, and her unabashed public rejection of anti-Blackness in U.S. Catholicism.
Less known is her early decades as a teenager in the Wisconsin-based Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, following her conversion to Catholicism from the Black Methodist tradition in elementary school. She was the first Black member of her order and gradually came to embrace her calling as a sign of Black Catholic contradiction.
“The two didn’t always jibe,” said conference panelist Dr. Kathleen Dorsey Bellow, the director of Xavier University of Louisiana’s Institute for Black Catholic Studies, where Bowman once taught as a professor.
“There were very many challenges for her because the spirituality that she brought was not appreciated in most places where she went.”
Bellow and Nutt were among various conference contributors and attendees who knew Bowman personally. One of the panels focused on this intersection, featuring a fellow Black religious sister, one of the nation’s Black monsignors, and a former student of Bowman’s when she taught at CUA.
“She had a sense of humor about her. She had a little Black itchiness for the Good News that she would seek out,” said Sr Barbara Spears of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a fellow member with Bowman of the National Black Sisters’ Conference.
“She taught us how to be family with our brothers, particularly our brother priests, and how to be sister, mother, and guide for our young seminarians… There were so many ways that she inspired us.”
Bowman’s ability to inspire has continued long after her death from cancer at age 52 in 1990, with Sunday marking 35 years to the day. Her cause for canonization—opened by the Diocese of Jackson in 2018—was the theme of the conference’s final panel, on the mechanics of saint-making and the utility of Black models of holiness.
“I want to be a saint, just as we know that Sr Thea already is, amen?” said Fr Robert Boxie III, the chaplain of HU Bison Catholic at Howard University, whose gospel choir also performed at the conference.
“This universal call to holiness, this perfection of charity… is living out the very life of Christ in us. Christ is perfect in charity and selflessness and generosity and humility, this radical inclusion, this radical welcome of everyone. And we have to live out in our own lives.”
Bowman’s sainthood cause is among the newest of the seven for African-American Catholic candidates, and the conference’s final Q&A session underscored that the waiting period therein can feel exclusionary or even racist. (To date, no African-American Catholic has been beatified or canonized.)
Asked whether the pope can waive the requirement for a Vatican-verified miracle to beatify someone like Bowman—as Pope Francis recently did to canonize Pope St. John XXIII—panelist Dr. Jeannine Marino, a canon law expert, noted that “all things are possible for Christ.”
“I think that's one of the beautiful things about our current Holy Father, right? When he sees a need, he finds a way to make it happen, so I don't know. Maybe we can pray for that, too.”
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
