I am Catholic and a historian of Catholics—and over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that U.S. Catholics need a new account of ourselves and our history. The standard story of a persecuted immigrant people who become Americans (and even get a couple of their own elected president), then live happily ever after just won’t do anymore.
I’m not alone in this impulse, among Catholics or historians. For my part, I’ve devoted my time to telling stories that illuminate both Catholic complicity in systems of oppression and Catholics against racism, Catholics who stood up for what is right and just, often in defiance of their coreligionists. This digital storytelling project, Bad Catholics, Good Trouble, feels especially relevant for us today.
Let me share with you a handful of the stories I’m talking about. You may have never heard of these events (I hadn’t until recently), but they didn’t happen all that long ago. Two of these stories are also featured on my webcomic Bad Catholics, Good Trouble; all of them are instructive for Catholics and Christians—and frankly, all people, religious or otherwise—who are committed to building a better world.
Arthur McFarland
In 1963, Arthur McFarland, a Black Charlestonian who converted to Catholicism while a student of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The following year, he was one of nine Black students to desegregate the white Catholic Bishop England High School. Later that year, he was arrested during the Charleston Movement sit-ins.
Sister Mary Antona Ebo
A Black Franciscan Sister of Mary named Mary Antona Ebo was one of the many people who heeded Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call in March 1965 to join the fight for voting rights in Alabama. State troopers brutalized protesters on “Bloody Sunday,” but that didn’t stop Ebo. Just days later, she traveled from St. Louis to Selma. “I’m here because I’m a Negro, a nun, a Catholic,” she declared, “and because I want to bear witness.”
Chicago protests
The same year that Ebo was bearing witness in Selma, 250 civil rights activists sat down in the middle of a major intersection in downtown Chicago. They brought traffic to a halt to protest the city’s segregated public schools. Among the arrested were seven priests and five sisters. Dressed in their black-and-white collars and habits, they smiled and sang freedom songs as they were put into paddy wagons.
The following year, Dr. King and his family moved to Chicago, hoping to expand the South’s civil rights movement into the urban North. That summer, activists led open housing marches through the segregated southwest side of the city. Sister Mary Angelica Schultz, a white Sister of St. Francis, protested with them. White Catholic Chicagoans hurled racist epithets at the marchers; they also threw bricks and bombs. Schultz was hit in the head with a brick that day.
Richard Martínez
On Christmas Eve 1969, Richard Martínez joined hundreds of people gathered outside St. Basil Catholic Church in Los Angeles to confront Cardinal James McIntyre. Martinez was a Chicano Catholic and a member of Católicos Por La Raza, a coalition of students, workers, welfare mothers, nuns, white Catholics, and Chicano militants. They had organized to protest the millions of dollars the church had spent on a new cathedral while neglecting the poor, especially Mexican Americans.
Good trouble
Black, white, and Latino; young, middle-aged, and older: These brief stories tell of people who got into “good trouble” (as the late John Lewis would have put it). Getting into good trouble means fighting for justice, equity, and democracy for all people, even—especially—when the fight runs afoul of the people in power.
In 2014 at Emory University’s commencement ceremony, Lewis, who had been arrested and beaten over and over during the fight for civil rights, told the graduates: “You must find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble. Necessary trouble . . . to help make our country and make our world a better place where no one will be left out or left behind.” The phrase became popular during the first Trump administration. After Lewis’ death in 2020, the New York Times printed his farewell essay, where he again insisted that “ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble.”
Bad Catholics?
Arthur McFarland, Sister Mary Antona Ebo, Sister Mary Angelica Schultz, and Richard Martínez all got into good trouble. And they were all “bad Catholics.” Or at least, that’s what many of their fellow Catholics thought.
Here’s just a short selection of the criticisms white Catholics sent to their bishops regarding the people they considered bad Catholics:
“I will not call those lawbreakers nuns.”
“I am nauseated with the mere thought that I may have unknowingly subjected my children to the teachings of smirking women . . . who defy the laws of the country.”
“When those supposedly dedicated to Christ, lay in the gutters with filthy men and women defying city laws . . . [we] are finished.”
“What the hell is happening to my church?”
“As a staunch Roman Catholic for 23 years and having attended Catholic schools for 16 years, I have never been so shocked, horrified, embarrassed, and disgusted by the conduct of a group of nuns at a recent civil rights demonstration.”
“I have been a Catholic for all my 34 years and consider myself a good Catholic.
Personally I cannot see priests and nuns participating in these civil rights movements . . . [It is] a disgrace.”
“I am past 60 years of age, born of and raised by Roman Catholic parents. I have always respected the lawful beliefs of other people and have never been ashamed of my religion until our nuns and priests commenced to engage in the so-called ‘Civil Rights’ demonstrations, which in my opinion are not only unlawful but, according to some sources, are Communist inspired.”
Suffice it to say, these were the “polite” letters. This is just a taste of the disgust and shame many white Catholics felt when they saw photographs, read articles, or witnessed firsthand fellow Catholics fighting for racial justice. These white Catholics who wrote outraged letters to their bishops were the “real, good, and sincere Catholics.” Or, at least, that’s how they thought of themselves.
The “good trouble” McFarland, Ebo, Schultz, and Martínez stirred up ran counter to the Catholicism preached in most parishes and taught in most parochial schools at the time. One white Catholic wrote that if the church were to be racially integrated, “Many real good and sincere Catholics might leave the church.”
Many US Catholics simply wanted their “old Catholic religion back.” They wanted religion that emphasized law and order and obedience to authority. Not just the church’s moral authority, mind you, but also the earthly authority of police, state troopers, mayors, governors, and the federal government. They wanted to make the church great again, they said, as they professed their faith and objected to civil rights for Black people, all in the same breath.
The 1960s were marked by US investment in devastating warfare, as well as corruption, kleptocracy, political violence and assassinations, campus unrest, urban uprisings, and calls for law and order. The Civil Rights Era was not that long ago, though—and not so unlike our own conflicted times.
Bad Catholics. Good trouble. I suggest that both terms should invite self-reflection rather than certitude, introspection instead of satisfaction. Before we rush into our righteous bifurcation of the world, we should ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a “bad Catholic”? And what does it mean to be a “good Catholic”? Perhaps most important, we need to discern when events, our consciences, and—ironically—our religious tradition itself call us to be “bad Catholics” who stir up “good trouble.”
Catholics against racism
As we go in search of more honest accounts of Catholic history, we can also look farther back than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The past three centuries of Catholics on this continent testify to their active participation in political and racial violence. At the same time, though, we can find concrete examples of Catholics against racism who modeled a different way to live our Catholicism.
For example, when 1940s Boston was a stronghold of the antisemitic and thoroughly Catholic Christian Front, Frances Sweeney, a white Catholic journalist in the city, launched a one-woman crusade against fascism.
Father Joseph Carbery is another story for us to consider. He was a white Jesuit who, unlike most of his fellow Maryland Jesuits, saw enslaved people as human beings and encouraged members of the Mahoney family to run when the slave catchers came.
The multigenerational story of the Mahoneys themselves, Black Catholics of “uncommon faithfulness,” offers us even stronger examples of courage and commitment. Enslaved by Jesuits, Mahoneys were among the 272 human beings sold to save Georgetown University in 1838.
And let us not forget the enslaved Kongolese Catholics who, in 1739, timed their slave rebellion on South Carolina’s Stono River to coincide with the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary.
So many good Catholics getting in good trouble. And alongside them, far more Catholics who saw things differently.
I’m sure you have your own stories to tell. You may know Catholics who refuse to address injustice in their neighborhoods, their schools, and their parishes. Some even vote and organize to keep oppressive structures in place. Meanwhile, you may know other Catholics who have taken feet to the streets and bricks to the head in the struggle for social justice. Both have been labeled “bad Catholics.” And both challenge us to reflect on the past and what lessons it holds for our present and future.
Today’s challenges
I don’t know about you, but my church community is worried about a lot of things right now.
We are worried about the safety of immigrants, the welfare and human dignity of innumerable children, parents, and grandparents at our borders and within our communities. We are concerned about ongoing attacks on democratic institutions and on the civil and human rights of all citizens. We worry especially about individuals and communities who are vulnerable to the abuse of authoritarian power—poor people, LGBTQ+ people, undocumented people, Black, brown, and Indigenous people. As fires rage, flood waters rise, and infrastructures strain, we worry about the planet itself.
Each of these worries (and many more not named here) requires action. They call for a coming together among families and within neighborhoods, churches, and communities. They demand that we ask ourselves: What might we do together to make our community more just, equitable, and livable for everyone? How can we organize effectively to make the world a better place for all of us?
We need not reinvent the wheel here. Numerous organizations, Catholic and otherwise, local and national, are already engaged in this work. Join them. Support them financially. Seek and you will find local organizations who are looking for ordinary people of faith who can accomplish extraordinary things in coalition together.
What does “good trouble” look like today? The answers to that question include many options. There are organizations to join, books to read, marches to attend, teach-ins to organize, campaigns to donate to, and so much more.
And lo, they will call you “bad Catholics” for the good trouble you stir up. When you have a fuller sense of our history, though, you can wear that label with pride. You’ll know you aren’t the first Catholic troublemaker to stand up for justice. We pray you won’t be the last.
✝ The author would like to acknowledge his coauthors, Jennifer and Judith Daubenmier and Arthur McFarland; his artistic collaborators, Marcus Jimenez and Megan Goodwin; and the generous support of the American Academy of Religion, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Crossroads Project at Princeton, without whom Bad Catholics, Good Trouble would not exist.
Image: Unsplash/Thomas de Luze
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