Diana Hayes was a Methodist, a self-acknowledged "introverted bookaholic" and an attorney practicing in Albany, N.Y., when she got "the Call" -- a call to lose her privacy, abandon herself and to "let go and let God." Her answer to that call, she told two CTA sessions, led her to the Catholic Church, advanced degrees in theology and her own perspective on the role of blacks in the church today.

In its earliest days, said Hayes, a theology professor at Georgetown University, the church was a lay movement; ministry was not aligned with power and authority but with simple service, largely by the poor, the slaves and the women. These early believers understood the "radically naive, subversive" nature of Jesus' message, she said -- a message that contradicted old assumptions with the news that "the Kingdom of God is already among us." That subversive tradition, in Hayes' view, continues in black liberation theology and in the black sense of "a sacred cosmos" (a sense of the holy encompassing all creation).

As a black Catholic, she sees herself not as "some exotic character" but as one who traces her ministerial and theological lineage back to that early community of outsiders. Today, she said, the church needs ministers who serve "abused children and the abusers too; the battered women and batterers too; and even the foul-mouthed youths who scare the hell out of us and themselves!" Catholics, she insisted, must get beyond "sharing a pew and nothing else" with fellow believers; we must "allow our- selves to minister and be ministered to."

Unfortunately, she noted, black participation in church leadership is only minimal: for the 3.1 million black Catholics, only six women theologians, 700 nuns, 300 priests, and 13 bishops. But she rejected despair in the face of disappointing numbers. The overwhelming message of the gospels, she noted, is that, regardless of age, experience or failure, "God is not through with us yet."