 Well, good afternoon everyone. I would like to welcome you to this event, the very first event in this semester's program in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University. We obviously don't know exactly where all of you are, but wherever you are, we're delighted you're here and we're looking forward to spending an hour or so with you debating a topic of considerable historical and contemporary interest. So the very first living theology workshop I think you can call it, is dedicated to the topic Catholic, Jesuits and Slavery. And there will be three of us talking with you on this topic for the next hour or so. Well, we wait for, make sure that everyone who is participating is actually on screen. I thought I would just use this moment to do a little commercial for our next event, which is taking place on October the 7th. So that's two weeks from today. Again, it's a similar time. It's at five o'clock and at five o'clock, two weeks from today, we have one of the major lectures that we offer every year. This is the O'Callaghan lecture on women in the church. And at five o'clock on Wednesday, October the 7th, it will be offered by Sister Colleen Gibson of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Now, some of you may know her, some of you may not. She's a Fairfield grad, class of 2009. She was valedictorian. She was captain of the Women's Rugby Club. And now she's coming back to speak on the topic showing up the radical work of commitment in uncertain times. So you can go on to the Fairfield University Catholic Studies website, fairfield.edu-cs. And you can register for that. And while you're there, you can see the other six or so events that we'll be offering between now and the end of the semester. So we really do hope that you'll take a look and join us if you possibly can. And I think today's going to be very interesting. And I know that Colleen Gibson is a great thoughtful speaker, a great presence. So we will look forward to having you then. Now, just a word about how we proceed here. I'm actually going to start things off by giving you a little bit of historical background to this topic. And after I give you a little bit of historical background, we will turn to our two speakers for today. And the two speakers in order in which they will speak, I'm just going to introduce them very, very briefly, because that's our procedure in living theology. Probably should have said my own name is Paul Lakeland. And I direct the Center for Catholic Studies. And you are watching two major speakers from the university faculty who will really take on this topic in their own way and in their own words after I do this historical background. So first, after I speak first will be Professor Rochelle Rundebel, who is chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. And to follow her, Professor Clarence Hardy, who is a colleague of mine in the Department of Religious Studies. So those are the people who you will be hearing from shortly. One thing that you may need to know is that you have the opportunity, if you wish, to pose questions to people. You don't have to wait till the end of the session. You can, if the question occurs to you as we go along, you can place that question on the Q&A. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you will see a little icon that says Q&A. And if you go in there, you can type in your question. And then at the end of our speakers, we'll have some time, I'm sure, to look at at least some of the questions that you put forward. So that's pretty much what I need to say before we begin. So let me begin, then, this little historical component by telling you that really when people think about slavery in the United States or think about American slavery, they naturally enough tend to think about slavery in the Antebellum South. But I want us to begin by realizing that slavery in the Americas, in the colonies, goes back to really to the very beginning of the colonizing of the continent. And it has been the product of really three different colonial powers, Spain, France, and England. So let's first get back behind the assumptions about the English colonies. Very few people have ever heard of Estebanico. We only know his one name, but he's a very important starting point for our conversation, because in 1532, this is how far back we're going. In 1532, four survivors of a huge expedition to the Americas, about 300 men, four survivors set off on a trek across what is now the southern part of the United States. Just four guys, they left from Florida and they ended up, they went through what is now Texas and they ended up in Mexico City. This is a huge trip, I assume they walked or had a horse, but that was the only the only way they could have done it. And one of those four, his name was Estebanico. His leader was a man called Cabeza de Vaca, which people have sometimes have heard of him. But we know three things about Estebanico. We know that he was an African, possibly a Moor, but from Africa. We know that he was a slave and we know that he was a Catholic. And I eventually actually, he went on to the West Coast and evangelized some of the indigenous peoples in what is now California and came to a rather sad and brutal end. But I wanted to mention his name at the beginning, just to say at the very beginning of colonization, we have a black Catholic slave at work. So I just said these early colonizers divided into three groups, the Spanish, the French and the British. The Spanish were busy mostly in Florida and in the Southwest, the French mostly in Canada and present day Louisiana and the British along the Eastern seaboard. Each group engaged in slave holding and irony of ironies since all were Christian, either Protestant or Catholic. They worked to convert or more precisely to baptize their slaves into their own tradition. European settlement of what would become the United States began on September the 8th, 1565 when Spanish Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded Saint Augustine on the Northeast Florida coast. The town of Saint Augustine, really the first settlement. He arrived with ships filled with soldiers, wives, children and Africans who were mostly slaves. Now this is half a century before the British arrived in Jamestown with their own slaves in tow. And Saint Augustine went on in time to become a haven for blacks who fled slavery in the English colonies where they were welcomed by the Spanish as free blacks on one condition that they accepted baptism into the Catholic religion. So it became Catholics and in that case freedom from slavery. During this 18th century the Florida territory was in Spanish hands for much of the time, the British or the English at other times, and it was finally ceded to the United States permanently in 1821. So this is Florida by 1840, five years before it became a state, about 50,000 people lived in the territory, half of them black slaves and many, but by no means all, baptized Catholics. Here's a strange question. What was the best time or the least bad time to be a slave in the Americas? My vote would be for the French colony of Louisiana in the first decades of the 18th century. At that time the relations between slaves and their owners was governed by a legal document called the Code Noir, the black code. While we don't know how well the owners adhered to the code or the colony's government administered it, it did provide a number of important protections for slaves. For example, they were not allowed to work on Sundays and if they were found working on Sundays, their owners lost their slaves. Of course Sundays the day of rest and French Louisiana was Catholic. They were allowed to appeal to the attorney general if they were being abused or fed poorly and their owners were forbidden to separate parents by selling one or the other or to sell any child under the age of 14. The code is long and has many other provisions. It's a remarkable document, even if it did not relieve the brutality of that slavery in many areas under French control. Here is a page from the Code Noir which shows some of the brutality I told you about the legal protections. There is the Fleur-de-Lis, the French symbol, and here is the is article 38. The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the day his master reported him to the police shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded with the Fleur-de-Lis on one shoulder. If he commits the same infraction for another month again counting from the day he is reported he shall have his hamstring cut and be branded with the Fleur-de-Lis on the other shoulder. The third time he shall be put to death. So that's the other side of the Code Noir but it did have some legal protections for people and it did actually result in a higher percentage of blacks being free people of color than under the British system. So at that time about 13 percent of blacks in Louisiana were free. In Mississippi the percentage was 0.8 percent. So you can see there was some flexibility there. Actually those freed were under restrictions from the Code Noir but on average they were exceptionally literate with a significant number of them owning businesses, properties, and even slaves. Now all of this notwithstanding when we think about slavery in North America we think mostly about the slaves held by British plantation owners in the last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th. We should not forget however that the Maryland Catholics of a century before did not encounter a slave culture in the Americas so much as help found it. And here's a remarkable fact something to puzzle over I believe. In the 18th century the Chesapeake Bay region was home to the second largest concentration of slave labor in the burgeoning British Empire. In 1790 when the first formal census of Maryland's population was taken by the United States government roughly a third of the state's entire population was enslaved. Between 1743 and 1759 so a bit earlier the average number of slaves owned by an elite planter in Maryland was 22. The average number of slaves owned by a Catholic plantation owner in Maryland, elite or clerical, was 31. 23, 31. Indeed Catholics such as Charles Carroll of Annapolis the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence were some of the largest slave holders in the entire colony and notice that among the slave holders were clerics including Jesuits. In the late 18th century the priests formerly known as Jesuits this is a complicated historical thing there was like a 50 year period when Jesuits were abolished but the people who had been Jesuits maintained a kind of community together so at the end of the 18th century they were in this limbo for a while but they owned about 15,000 acres of land on the eastern shore so here's an example of this let me show you one example of this in this in this table here see that table so here is the eastern shore this is about 1760 something like that and down the left hand side you can see the names of the plantations and the second column shows you how many Jesuits lived at these plantations how many acres they were how many slaves they had and then the last column is the annual income in British pounds pounds sterling so look at the last line and you can see 12 Jesuits farmed or owned 12,000 acres of land with the aid of 192 slaves this is not inconsiderable these same priests in the early 19th century actually in 1832 sold 272 slaves to pay the debts that threatened the existence of Georgetown College it's to the and that was actually quite controversial even among Catholics at the time that they that they would do this it's to the credit by the way of two-thirds of Georgetown students who voted in April last year to establish a semester fee to fund reparations for the descendants of these people so why did Catholics hang on to slavery well into the 19th century some say it had a lot to do with the wish to be as American as possible and in the southern states at least that meant slavery it was also complicated by the fact that to a southern Catholic an abolitionist was a northern free thinker and many of them were others explained the complacency by citing the authority of st. Augustine and st. Thomas Aquinas both of whom thought slavery could be justified and of course lurking in the background were the words of st. Paul slaves obey your masters masters treat your slaves well but the probable likeliest reasons were one that the economy of the south depended on slavery in this antebellum period and two Catholic leaders did not want to be seen to be challenging what was simply a fact of life in the south it was hard enough for Catholics to gain acceptance as Americans as it was why rock the boat so let me finish by just turning to a couple of bishops who spoke out in defense of slavery the first john england was named bishop of charleston south carolina exactly 200 years ago this month and he was actually a pioneering liberal bishop he created a bicameral legislature for the administration of this diocese in which lay people men of course had serious responsibilities but when pope Gregory the 16th wrote a letter against slavery some two decades later and a member of the south carolina state legislature accused the pope of being an abolitionist john england came to his defense no of course the pope wasn't an abolitionist he was simply opposed to the slave trade really what's the difference well it is quite wrong to take free people and enslave them but for those who have lived in slavery for perhaps many generations he thought the situation is quite different and the second bishop john kenrick of philadelphia wrote in much the same vein and let his words be the last word here though and i quote slavery does not wipe out the equality of nature among human beings and he believes slaves should be well treated he goes on slavery thus understood is not at odds with natural law in such a way that it might be considered a sin for the greater good of the human race slavery is endured with christian kindness up to the present day among civilized nations and a quote i leave you to determine how much christian kindness the slaves encountered and with that you have a little historical background and that's the end of my contribution to this for now at least i'll come back to you when we get to question and answer but for now i want to turn this over to uh rachel brunbevel who will pick up the argument here so rachel over to you thank you very much professor lakeland so i'll order my comments in this way i'll talk a little bit about my background as it relates to catholicism i'll talk a little bit about catholic slave owning and then pick up on the question where the lakeland left us a few minutes ago with regard to why would catholics own slaves or support slavery and then end with some reflection on how this is related to some more contemporary issues with the catholic church and racial justice so first to talk about my own background so i um went to catholic elementary school and catholic high school i grew up in queens new york and um when i was in catholic school a lot of my friends would be surprised to find out that i was actually catholic a lot of my friends that were going to public schools or the neighborhoods with me because they had this perception that catholics were white and based on a new york times article that was written in august about three percent of american catholics are black so that perception was probably somewhat correct at the time um but they had all kinds of misconceptions about what uh catholic church was like um surprised that in my church was almost entirely black surprised that we had gospel music surprised that we had liturgical dance um surprised that we had youth groups and youth retreats primarily with uh blacks um youth young people who will go to these things so there was this this real curiosity about what it meant to be um the black catholic but i will say um despite the fact that i went to catholic school from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade we really or i don't recall us ever really talking about catholic slave owning um or talking about catholics really playing any role um during the time of slavery or during the time of abolition it wasn't discussed explicitly um in school or in church um with regard to my schooling experience i probably had maybe three to four black teachers in elementary school and and maybe probably about the same number um in high school but when issues of race came up we again we really didn't talk about slavery or that period so i think it's that's curious to me um why that's the case um so to kind of move on from that to think about why is it that catholics would participate in slavery um why would they not speak out against it right um of course there's a financial incentive which professor lakeland just showed us in those tables right with regard to the economic engine that was owning enslaved people but if we think about christians one of the central tenants of our faith is to love your neighbor as yourself and clearly owning a person runs counter to that right but um professor lakeland also talked about how catholics were trying to become accepted or trying to be viewed as legitimate americans but if we think again about american ideals if we think about the declaration of independence and we think about the words that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they're endowed by their creator from certain and illegal no rights that are life liberating the pursuit of happiness the ideals of life and liberty and equality that were expressed in declaration of independence also runs counter to enslavement and it definitely runs counter to the kind of enslavement that we had in united states where which was chattel slavery where the people who were born of slaves were slaves for the rest of their lives so as catholics are trying to be perceived as american and authentic owning enslaved persons is running counter to both of the ideals around what it means to be american and what it means to be catholic yet for some reason catholics still continue to own slaves and i think that this is related to larger issues that are taking place even now with regard to the catholic church and issues of racial justice there was an article in the new york times as well published in august that was titled racism makes a liar of god and by elizabeth brunig and in it she was talking about gloria pervis who was a co-host of a popular catholic radio show called morning glory and gloria pervis denounced the killing of george floyd at the end of may and talked about and talked about other killings of unarmed black men and women and talked about these as being issues of racism and she received some backlash on social media on twitter via email and then her show ended up being canceled in june and that article in the new york times talks about this belief by some that there's a tension between the catholic church black lives matter and racial justice movements so some of these long-term issues related to catholic slaveholding or the perception that being catholic and black or kind of antithetical are showing up again now when we're talking about the black lives matter movement also with regard to racial justice and right now brian massingale has given an interview recently with common wheel magazine where he was talking about the catholic church being uncomfortable with talking about racial justice outwardly for fear of making some white catholics uncomfortable and because of this fear of being uncomfortable the catholic church has not been as proactive as some other groups to be outwardly anti-racist and that as long as we're concerned with those issues we won't really be able to confront racism in the catholic church or to be able to be a movement for justice outside the catholic church so even though catholic slaveholding was some time ago and even though we're now at a point where we do see some clergy of color there are very few that i've known black american clergy in the catholic church and i think this also speaks to sort of an unwillingness that speak about issues of racism and this perhaps is a significant issue and that will be a lot harder to mobilize younger catholics especially younger black catholics to be involved in the catholic church so i think i'll end my remarks there for now but look forward to questions in the q&a thank you paul thank you rachel i thought it would be useful for me to at least give you some context for my own intellectual work and how i come to the topic that paul is introduced my own work concerns largely the development of black religious traditions in the 20th century which is largely understood as deeply connected and associated with Protestantism um and my own work um where i've been thinking quite a bit about the legacy of slavery the habit uh among many of us who work in this area has been to connect quite deeply the formations of Protestantism in particular in north america uh with race um let me give you an example what i mean one of the more important books to emerge in the last 10 years was written by a woman by the name of rebecca getz and the subtitle of her book is how christianity created race and in her book she basically just she describes how Protestant slaveholders in an attempt to maintain their ability to retain mastery and dominance racialized what would become black people to exclude them from the possibilities of becoming christian in the first place so in my own work i hadn't done much i'm thinking or pursued with any serious depth the connection between catholicism in the united states and a development of slavery and the legacy of white supremacy in the centuries that follow but i do think that paul is very helpful in making lifting up the for attention uh georgetown university's recent declaration and recent attempt to grapple with uh with their connection with slavery and i wanted to deepen a couple of comments that paul made in his own uh brief connection a brief summary of georgetown's situation is is quite right that what set off the debate and recent conversation at georgetown uh jesuit founded school is the selling of 272 enslaved persons um to planters in louisanta um to save the institution um i will say at the very beginning here it's important to recognize this is not the last time that georgetown has this connection with slavery there were enslaved persons all way up to the emancipation of slaves in dc in the 1860s and indeed much of the resource base of georgetown university in the previous century since it's based in maryland a lot of the major benefactors of georgetown had links direct links to the plantations in maryland and there was a really robust um slave trade and slave industry and maryland and georgetown had had this long association with benefactors who were enmeshed in slavery um many of you might know um franz scott key the writer of the um the the the american anthem his cousin was a major benefactor uh to georgetown and these were all maryland maryland um elites um so it um as paul has suggested in some measure it's really hard to differentiate how catholics acted in the 19th century as related to slavery and how protestants acted as it related to slavery um and so i don't think it's useful to um deepen drill down something that paul had alluded to in his own um wrestling with how to think about catholics and their participation in jesuitz in particular their participation with slavery in the 19th century the question that he framed was what does it mean to be an american and is this an attempt to be just as american as everyone else and of course the way this is usually framed and rachel hinted at this in terms of thinking about this the way this is usually framed is as this big major contradiction between uh american values and perhaps christian values and the reality uh and the reality of slavery when we think about the american experiment the way we usually tell the story is that it's really fixated on this notion of being the first major democratic um expression and the new world so-called new world that begins with a declaration of independence celebrating universal values and then instantiates itself in the constitution with the declaration we the people but i thought it would be useful um to trouble this notion of what it means to be an american and whether there really is a deep contradiction between that americanness and the claims and legacy and reality of slavery i was reminded of this because in my own courses one of the major figures that i've been teaching in in heaven as a source of conversation with students is the great fanger w e b de bois um whose most famous text so is the black folk um one way of thinking about that text is that it's his attempt to tell the american story by putting black people at the center and what does that mean when one tells the story that way and when i was uh sharing this with students we would highlight his seventh chapter in that book which is um where he explores what he calls the black belt this is a part of the region in georgia which actually originally was named after the richness of the soil but then closely became associated with the numbers of black people who were there and so he tells his story about um about the origins of the black belt and he tells a story from the origin from the perspective of black people and he begins the story not with this grand declaration about democracy he begins the story with the displacement of cherokee and creek people in georgia pushed out in this place and pushed west and then how african people were brought to replace these natives peoples to work the land and then he goes on to describe um the society that is established in this black belt and he doesn't describe uh a democracy he describes an aristocracy where you have landed gentry who serve at the pleasure of the king this king being cotton and the profit motive of producing cotton and then he makes the the job by looking at the 1880s and 1890s and this is when he's most immediately writing and he basically argues that the democratic experiment only lasted for about a dozen years right after the civil war and what you actually had happened was a reconstitution of the original aristocracy that was um um there with the uh with the british settlers in georgia i say all this go back to one of the founding figures of the american experiment james madison often described as the father of the constitution and in the private letter that he wrote in his 1780s 18 not 1790s somewhere in that area he wrote in his private letter where slavery prevails the society is democratic and named but aristocratic in fact and so this the circle right back around to where paul brought us in the very beginning when he asked the question what does it mean to be an american and if catholics were trying to be just as american as everyone else in the middle of the 19th century and this is the time that georgetown is debating about what do they need to do to survive so we need to sail these slaves in order to be able to survive if as um the scholar and that gordon reid has put it if we told the story about the family of america as the aristocracy of white men overlaid with the language of democracy then maybe this is not so much a paradox right when we have this conversation about what does it mean right to be an american and be connected with slavery what does it mean to be a christian related to slavery it's all about getting along and not rocking the boat and not disturbing the system that is already deeply entrenched and established so i'll leave i'll leave um that is just an initial attempt to reframe the question a little bit um in terms of thinking about this question of both american identity and religious identity and i'll stop there well thank you uh rachel and clarence for getting us started here and we've got some time now to think about to to hear from some of you in the in the uh some of you out there wherever you are who might have a comment or a question about anything you've heard here and there's two or three questions sort of lined up but i would encourage anyone who wishes to do so to put something in now just go to the q and a at the bottom of the page and just type in your question and we'll we'll get to it uh if we possibly can so i the first question we we have here is um in in some ways asking uh i think it's it's a question for anyone certainly for rachel or or clarence and um it's asking you to speculate a little bit but the question would be is this so so the the the the the writer of the question first of all likes what she's hearing and says i'm glad we're talking about this and i was wondering if we think fairfield university Jesuits might have owned slaves if we were established in the 18th or even the 19th century so i don't know anybody has a thought about that i mean in some ways the question is impossible to answer but that that example georgetown i think is a crucial one right i mean i think many people imagine that georgetown was this oasis of liberty and good correct religious devout thinking and it's a bit of a shock to find out just how enmeshed georgetown was and in slavery and even with the declaration that they were going to try to avoid the slave trade they participate in it right in order to save their own skin right that moment in 1838 when they sell they were wrestling with this idea for about 20 years about what to do with these enslaved persons um and they finally decided shortly after a major crash in 1837 and started to pick up a bit in 1838 um they decided to to sell their enslaved persons to a planter in louisiana with the guarantee with two provisions that they were that enslaved persons would be in a situation where they could continue to practice the catholic faith and with the understanding that they would not separate husbands and wives as was often the case in 1830s and 1840s this is not some bold stand against um against slavery this is um when it really gets tight um you're just as enmeshed as other people um and the distinctions are hard to determine when framed against other people in that same uh geographic region so um at least that's how I would begin to address the question I think one of the things that um so we uh we certainly know which I don't know whether this would lead us to answer the question yes or not is that in in uh in 18th and early 19th century fairfield Connecticut there were slaves not many but there were a few so that might lead us towards saying yes especially since if the Jesuits had been here then they'd have had 200 acres to take care of right um rachel do you want to say anything about that or yeah I mean I think part of the question um under the question might be about because we're in the north as well right we're in new england I think it tends to be the perception that those in the north were not really profiting from slavery and that's definitely not the case um many of the insurance companies based in you know in heart for Connecticut were writing insurance policies on enslaved persons right and those were profitable for their owners as well so I think under the question is also you know how has the north profited from slavery even though there were not as many enslaved persons up up north but they definitely did have to answer benefits from it as well there is another question here just moving moving us along a little bit here so so here's a question about Lincoln so so the question is says it's interesting that Abe Lincoln wanted to send slaves back to their countries of origin after emancipation and the question is wondering if if he just believed they were inferior or he realized they'd be released into a racist society and system and would have a real struggle so what was Lincoln thinking about uh I suppose you would call it repatriating people you're nodding your head Rochelle sounds like you might like to take that one I was nodding my head because I remember Nicole Hannah Jones wrote about that in her 1619 project essay right she talked about these um black statesmen who were invited to come to the White House to talk to Lincoln they thought they was going to be about sort of ways to make things right or to better integrate you know newly freed people into American society and they were so shocked by his suggestion that they should really go back to a place they've never been right somewhere in West Africa so I mean I definitely don't at my opinion is not that he thought that it was going to be so difficult for those people who were newly freed to integrate and that he was sort of concerned about their well-being more so than he just saw them as so incompatible with what America was at that time that they must go back that they were so inferior and so different that they wouldn't be able to do well here or or or a threat to whites so therefore let's just send them back to from where they came at least that's how I read it I mean I think that's I think that's quite right rachel I mean I guess it's it's hard um I don't think the majority of white politicians in the 19th century believe that it was even possible to have a multiracial democracy and if you actually think about it in the United States we've only had a multiracial democracy in the United States since 1965 and one might argue that one of the major debates in terms of what it means to be in America right now in 2020 is still wrestling with that basic question about whether it's even possible to be a multiracial society in this particular um legatee of British colonialism in North America I think is um I don't want to get too um political necessarily here but I think it's still it's still up for debate I think you know I think maybe people have a better answer that question in a couple months if there's a free and fair election um is it would be one way to say it the other thing I would say is that Lincoln does evolve but he evolves largely because he's forced to he's forced to um because the war is going badly in the early part of the 1860s and the emancipation proclamation that he issues helps to reframe a war that was originally about just union to a moral cause against slavery um and so he's forced to by circumstance and he's also forced to because black people themselves are entering in the fray in a very direct way whether that's becoming a part of the army um that was doing battle um against the southern states or whether that's about being on on plantations and deciding not to work very hard or going on a kind of general strike as WB Du Bois would put it in turn in his book on reconstruction um and so circumstance and black people themselves help to force Lincoln's evolution to actually begin to think about the possibilities of a multiracial um um reality um but I think um it's hard to find a white politician in the 19th century who really believed in the possibilities of multiracial democracy it's just hard to find her and uh when uh when Lincoln did that he lost the catholic vote he did I mean the the 1864 election he lost the catholic vote because he switched the meaning to emancipation so the the catholics were very supportive until it turned out to be about emancipation which is a sad thing um Rochelle I have a question for you here and it goes back to your early your first remarks about um your background in Queens and the question is really this that you you know you talked about this church with its with its uh you know its gospel singing and so on and its retreats with black uh students and etc and the question really is um isn't it I think the question is a bit surprised that it sounds more like Protestant traditions where there's white churches and black churches and the story about Catholic churches rightly or wrongly is they tend to be more integrated so was that not the case I guess that's the question that was definitely not the case um in my experience um so the church that I went to in my in my mom's so goes to that church um was blocked from the house where I grew up and it was I'm gonna say 95 black um now it was multi-ethnic in a sense that there were people who were African-American people who were from Trinidad and Jamaica different parts of the Caribbean but it was in no way um multi-racial actually my first real experience is with the multi-racial Catholic church is a church in my neighborhood now so I live in Nassau County now and the church close to me is St. Boniface and it's a very multi-racial multi-ethnic multi-lingual church there are services in multiple languages every Sunday um and any like high holiday there are multiple languages in the liturgy so but that was really my first kind of experience with that the experiences I had growing up was not like that um even though our pastors were always um white and we had maybe a handful of white parishioners it was overwhelming only black at the time and it still is now actually the newest groups are um Nigerian-Americans who have services and um their language is too thank you um I guess that answers the question uh so here's another another question here this is an obvious one I think that was going to come up so the question is short and I don't know I think both of you might have a response here what do Jesuits owe black Americans due to their participation in slavery should what kind of reparations are uh are owed injustice I guess that's the question I was looking um at Georgetown's site preparing for this and they definitely have some links about how the descendants of those who enslaved there have to gather their genealogical records and can make themselves known to Georgetown admissions it's not quite clear from the site but I assume that that means that they might be treated the way um alumni's children might be treated perhaps I know that the fee that um Paul referenced with regard to the students voting to have a fee go towards the descendants it seems to be related to some kind of community-based projects that the descendants would work on with Georgetown officials if there'd be some kind of mutual agreement about the kinds of projects that they could work on so that could be a way to go um it could be in the form of scholarships reduced tuition or efforts in communities that are affected by those who had for those who are descendants might be a way to approach it I don't know if you have other ideas Clarence um bring every bring it all on I'm open to almost any conversation about reparations I do think that Georgetown example is a useful one um because I think the challenge is to think about it not just in financial terms but absolute moral terms and I actually am taking this a little bit from one of the leaders of the work study there that got by the name of um his name is Adam Rothman he's one of the historians who was leading um the project there and the point that he makes is that if you actually break down the 272 enslaved persons who were sold um to Louisiana it's not someplace you want to be sold by the way you don't want these sold down to sugar plantations where they work you even worse conditions than in Maryland at the time um it breaks down to about a million today dollars but that doesn't actually include all the enslaved persons that were working there before and all those enslaved persons who were working there all the way up through the 1860s um it doesn't include um the benefactors um who gave money to the institution partly based on their connections to slavery and so what Rothman actually argues um and I think this is an important point is that when they when they sold enslaved persons in 1838 the existence of the school was at stake it wasn't just simply about money so in a very real way Georgetown would not exist without enslaved persons so I actually sort of think I'm open to almost any kind of financial reckoning right and I think if we are just committed to thinking about that and there are a number of schools universities other organizations are engaged in this kind of practice and you know Prince Theological Seminary has done a similar kind of historical audit Columbia University has done a similar kind of historical audit audit a lot of these institutions are doing um this this very important work but the idea that our society would not exist without this theft from people I think actually puts the the terms in a very stark moral way so that um which motivate us to think really deeply and bring all of our moral imagination to the task of how to wrestle with um this afterlife of slavery as some scholars have described it. Thank you there's a there's a little follow-up which I can probably answer but the little follow-up asks um whether any other Jesuit schools at this time were in the same kind of trouble and who gave them permission to do this did they have to get permission from head office or whatever and actually that's interesting first there weren't any other Jesuit schools at this time right so this is the first um original in the United States but the the president of Georgetown at the time was a man called Thomas Malady and when he did this Rome was furious with him because in a strange way that Catholics don't really understand this but actually Rome was more liberal than the United States in terms of Catholicism at that time they were entirely opposed to slavery and when he sold them these slaves they were furious and they hauled them off to Rome but only for a year and then he was sent back to become the first president of Holy Cross so I don't know how you how you read that one that's a little tricky to figure that one out okay so we had another another question here so here's a question I'm just going to read the question for you given the interconnection of American Catholicism and racism what steps should or could contemporary Americans Catholics take to assist in dismantling the structural systems of oppression and racism that exist today and should that be seen as an expression of their faith so it's a question what should Catholics be doing and should they be doing it because they're Catholics I think that's the question anyone want to tackle that I'll take a try if you read Brian Massengale who writes a lot about Catholic Church and racial justice in his interviews he would argue yes American Catholics should be taking an active stand against racism they should be anti-racist and in one of his interviews was kind of a magazine he talks about racism as their liturgy and talks about how there's essentially I'm paraphrasing like the person or or institution that commits this racist act but then there are people who enable it by helping in some way and then then there are the people even beyond that the bystanders who are witnessing it and not saying anything so Massengale would say that small ways American Catholics can fight racism is that when they see things happening around with their families and their friends that are discriminatory whether it's like a racist joke or behavior or an action that they should call their family members out and their friends out and say that what you're doing is inappropriate it's racist I don't agree with it instead of looking the other way so that that's that's a small way in a larger way I think folks like Massengale would say that Catholics should be involved in fight for racial justice whether that's you know with regard to how you vote or what kind of causes you donate to or actually how you might protest but to be active in a in a public way as well I think that Massengale would say and I would agree with those things okay well we're a little over 5 30 and we have a few more minutes and we have two more questions that I can see so I think we have time to take to take those so the first actually it's an interesting question I've never thought about maybe our two speakers have so here's the question what led to slavery becoming color-based rather than from conquest I don't know are there examples of colonialism that has enslaved on a different basis or well what any any thought about that I'm having trouble with that question myself Florence ask a very complicated question I said and there's a lot of debate about the origins of racial racializing identities in a new world and else in elsewhere the book that I had made the reference to is in some ways and most of my work is so North American focused that you know a lot of the major actors were Protestants who were in some ways effectively trying to create a an identity that was perennially pagan permanently pagan and it's that overlay that we see blackness emerge in North America and so there is this there is this kind of connection between the language and vocabulary and habits of Christianity and how Christianity treats the pagan and even and how race begins to emerge in a similar kind of cultural metric and habit but there's been a lot of discussion about in this in a lot of this college discussion Catholic has come off a little bit better than Protestants do and but you know I don't know entirely how to answer the question I could I could point you to a number of books that have been wrestling with this question of Protestant supremacy versus Christian supremacy and how we should work through the connections between those two things and and the emergence of race in the 17th and 18th centuries but I mean that's my initial most of my work is much more 20th century based and so I just could assume this as a you know interested reader as opposed to someone who is deeply in the sources and working through but I can name four genome races rate of the races by calling kid there are a number of books that are about this this development and connection between race and religion as the primary modes for thinking about human difference well we have one final question and it's a big one so here's the question do you think Fairfield University as a Jesuit institution represents the Jesuit values we emphasize daily women and men for others forming and educating agents of change and so on if not what can the university do to do so this is including I'm just reading what it says here this is including the black stag's matter page on instagram and the alumni support group Michelle so I think like any institution you know our mission is our ideal and I think that every day we have to work hard at living up to our mission the black stags matter and the Fairfield alumni response team has been vocal about some of the ways that they think that Fairfield University can change for the better to become a even more anti-racist institution and since those groups have you know talked about things that they like to see change at Fairfield fair different Fairfield administrators and groups have met representatives from those groups to talk about what that might look like rjsj at Fairfield continues to meet and strategize about you know ways to improve our campus climate and culture there are more in faculty of color for example being hired at Fairfield so there are definitely signs of progress and there are ways that I think we continue to grow and hopefully conversations with these alumni groups and with current students and staff and faculty can make that more of a reality okay that's actually a good segue into our conclusions here so before I thank people let me go back to I don't know how many of you are listening and now we're here right at the beginning when I did a commercial for our next event which is taking place at five p.m. on Wednesday October the seventh so it's two weeks called showing up the radical work of commitment in uncertain times by a Fairfield alum religious sister who works in inner city Camden New Jersey so she she sees a lot of social issues so she's going to speak then but the reason this was a segue is because I wanted to come back to the living theology event so we have three every semester this is the first the second one will actually be on a Saturday morning so October the 17th and that will be devoted to talking with women from the first undergraduate class at Fairfield in 1970 what was it like which could be quite interesting I think but the third of the events on November the 11th again it's a Wednesday at 4 30 like this one we're going to devote to the whole issue of Black Lives Matter at Fairfield and we are hoping very much that that will be led by students more than by faculty or anyone else so that's something else to look at if you go to fairfield.edu slash cs you can find all the events for the semester and you can register for any of them right there and they're all no charge so with that my thanks to of course first to Rochelle and to Clarence for for doing this work my thanks to Mary Crimmins who is the person in the Center for Catholic Studies who does all the nitty-gritty work that I don't do and thanks to the staff at the media Center for putting all this making all this happen and while we're doing this Antony is running around in the background making sure that it's clear for you so thanks to all of them and of course above all thanks to those of you who attended this I hope you found it worthwhile I hope you'll keep talking about what you heard and I hope you will come back soon so with that this concludes our session so thank you all so much and we'll see you along the way somewhere thank you