The UFW march and the writing of Catholic history

Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s Grace of The Ghosts is an unflinching, multifaceted, and engrossing work that can be read as a Catholic sequel to her 2017 survey, The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America. There she explored how “Whiteness and Christianness have been twin pillars of the dominant religio-racial project” of settling and administering American society.

Here the professor of theology at Fordham University uses the metaphor of the ghost to consider the grim history of the Catholic Church in America. An enthusiastic partner in the project of nation-building, the church amassed its institutional wealth and prestige by rendering invisible the crassly ideological and material foundations on which it arose: the dehumanization and exploitation of African, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian peoples. These are the book’s eponymous ghosts, whose uncredited grace undergirds the prosperity and power of the contemporary church.

As the largest corporate slaveholder in America, the Catholic Church derived its generative wealth from the desecration and sale of African bodies; its role in the abolitionist cause was nil. Roger B. Taney, the Catholic chief justice of the antebellum US Supreme Court, was an avatar of Catholicism’s embedded White supremacy. As author of the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion (1857), the Maryland-born jurist marshalled the high court’s imprimatur to exile all people of African descent, whether slave or free, from the nation’s polity, declaring them stateless and possessing “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney denied the very humanity of bonded Africans by reducing them to mere “articles of merchandise.” He further distinguished Africans from America’s Indigenous people, who he classed in an amorphous category of “pupilage” from which they have yet to be fully liberated. Taney’s opinion greenlit the seizure and despoiling of Indigenous children and their culture in Catholic-run schools of “civilization.”