December 2001 Call to Action News

Diana Hayes wins U.S. Catholic award, and touches CTA hearts

The timing was perfect. As soon as Georgetown University theologian Diana Hayes finished speaking at CTA conferences in Los Angeles and Philadelphia about black Catholics in the 21st century, she traveled to Chicago Sept. 21 to receive U.S. Catholic magazine's 2001 award for furthering the cause of women in the church. She joins the ranks of such earlier awardees (and CTA speakers) as Rosemary Ruether, Rembert Weakland, Helen Prejean, and Jeanette Rodriguez Holguin, a national CTA board member.

Hayes is the leading Catholic proponent of womanist theology - the distinctive flavor of liberation theology arising from the experience of black women. Though blacks are a small segment of the Catholic Church in the U.S., Hayes told CTAers they represent a "subversive memory" - a prophetic presence that turns our values upside down. Science now traces all human beings to origins in Africa. Ethnographically, we are all African - all descended from one African woman. Deep down, the different races are one race. So our church must welcome everyone in an inclusive worshipping community. "Differences are not dangerous," she said. "They are divine."

Hayes converted to Catholicism in her student years. People often ask her why. She says: why not? "Blacks were enslaved and separated as a people. But they are in the Church to remind us that all the people of God were enslaved, and had to move from slavery to freedom. The black experience calls us all to faith, hope and the perseverance to endure." Also, says Hayes, 'Women remain the heartbeat of our African American Catholic communities, a status for which we are both exalted and maligned. We must use the strength of that status to be, once again, the bearers of culture and the birthers of the future."

Brown invokes black spirituals
Jesuit Fr. Joseph Brown of Southern Illinois University began his CTA presentation on the prophetic role of the black church by playing the spiritual, "Wade in the Water." He said the song "expresses the creative theology that African Americans were capable of a long time ago." But in each new generation, the song is re-understood in its new context. It is whatever the singer or the ritual guide wants it to be. "With every great black sacred song from the days of African enslavement in America, the song teaches you how to sing it," says Brown. The song gives you a rhythm, and once that rhythm has been understood, the song does something to the singer. "That's the key to the prophetic act of the black spiritual experience," Brown said. "The music establishes a sense of community that is authentically African and authentically Christian."

The "children" in black spirituals are the community, with different levels of experience and different gifts of the Spirit. Authority belongs to the one with the power to discern and the ability to be in touch with ancestors. Prophecy means seeing the world from God's point of view. "The mystics of the African tradition used the music to transport themselves to a different vision of reality. It was not an elite act. If you are part of the community and you dance to the rhythm, you go through a change of awareness and you are transported to a new reality."