I have been very grateful to hear from many parish groups, priests, parishioners, and others who want to send Christmas greetings to our seminarians. I spent the early days of December visiting with our six men and they are all doing very well. All of the seminarians will get a well-deserved winter break, but I’ve been very pleased that all of them want to dive into parish life while also spending time with their families and friends. Please tell our men hello and encourage them to keep working hard if you see them in your parish this Christmas.

In his book Priests for the Third Millennium, Cardinal Timothy Dolan writes about the virtues that a diocesan priest must have to properly care for his people. A man must develop virtues like humility, fidelity, courtesy, integrity, simplicity of life and joy in order to minister effectively as a diocesan priest. I am very proud of our seminarians for the dedication they have displayed to their formation. Each one of them has different gifts, strengths and weaknesses, but they are all trying to develop these virtues that are so necessary to caring for God’s people.

As a short update on their status…Grayson Foley is our youngest seminarian and will complete his 2nd year of formation this spring. His priestly ordination would be in the Spring of 2028. Will Foggo has two less years of formation than Grayson since he had already completed three years of undergraduate work at Mississippi State. Will’s priestly ordination would be in the Spring of 2026. Ryan Stoer and Tristan Stovall are past the halfway mark of formation. They are scheduled for priestly ordination in Spring 2024. Our “senior” seminarians include Carlisle Beggerly of West Point. Carlisle’s diaconate ordination is set for June 4, 2022, and he will be ordained a priest in Spring 2023. Deacon Andrew Bowden’s priestly ordination is set for May 14, 2022 at the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle. Deacon Andrew grew up at St. Jude in Pearl.

Thank you for your constant prayers and encouragement for these men. I am encouraged by the way they are using their talents and are courageously offering their lives to the Lord. Pray that they continue to develop the virtues a diocesan priest needs to serve you the best they can when, God willing, they come to their ordination day.

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may, I want to strongly endorse Ashlee Eiland’s new book, Human(Kind) – How Reclaiming Human Worth and Embracing Radical Kindness Will Bring Us Back Together.

This is not some sentimental, feel good book on how we need to be kind to each other. It’s more like a Sermon on the Mount for our time, or at least how we might work towards living the Sermon on the Mount. How do we remain soulful, warm, and human inside all the things that tend to unhealthily either inflate or embitter our hearts? Here’s how she describes her book.

“This is my story – a story of a black woman who grew up in the South and who discovered some wholeness and some holes along the way. As I looked back over my life, there were moments I remembered so vividly. Upon reflection, they were vivid because they mattered. They marked me in both beautiful and painful ways. But as I sat with these moments and memories, I realized they mattered because they taught me to be kind to my own worthy self. Recalling them helped me acknowledge the good gifts I’ve been given, the gifts I now hope to give to others, and enabled me to see the painful and hard moments as opportunities to be more fully human, to remind myself to receive grace where there’s been grievance.”

The book is a series of stories from her life, all of them told by a gifted storyteller and all of them written with an aesthetics that never sinks into sentimentality or self-pity. And they are stories both of being graced and being wounded. Eiland’s life has been one of contrasts.

On the one hand, her life has been one of privilege – loving parents, the opportunity for a first-rate education, never economically desperate, and always with a supportive family and community around her. On the other hand, she has lived as a black woman inside a world of injustice and inequality. She has had to live as one who must forever be conscious of the color of her skin, who every time she walks into a room needs to look around to see how many others like her are in the room. She also had to endure the ultimate racial slur being shouted in her face. And so, as she says, she has been deeply scarred both in beautiful and painful ways.

For example, one of her stories recounts an incident in which she went out to a restaurant with some Asian friends for a Korean specialty of pork dumplings. The evening went well and driving back from the restaurant and laughing with each other in the car, she felt a life-long weight lift from her. “For the first time, I didn’t feel as if I had to qualify the conversation with a reminder to my friends – or to myself – of my actual race. … Before that day, I felt I had to tiptoe out of one world into another. But that kind of posture, I realized, is laced with shame. It allows the ‘not fully enough’ narrative to run rampant, terrorizing what is oftentimes the best part about sharing our lives with one another.”

We need her narrative. We live in a time of bitterness and division, when civil discourse and respect have broken down, where we demonize each other, where injustice, inequality, and racism still define us more than their opposites, and where kindness is often seen as a weakness. Moreover, there is an ever-intensifying hypersensitivity where even a well-intended word is a potential landmine. Paranoia has replaced metanoia, bringing out the worst in us.

Ashlee Eiland gives us a formula for bringing out what is best in us. How do we react to injustice, offense,and demonization? For example, here is how she reacted after trying to be good to someone and being repaid for her effort by the ultimate racial taunt being hurled in her face: “Humiliated, I went about my day, doing as much good as I could for an afternoon … but knowing that sometimes even doing good is not enough. Sometimes we just have to sit with what’s hard and humiliating about the difficult work of unity and do our best not to let it kill us. Instead, we need to let it shape us in some other way that sobers us up and forces us to take off our rose-colored glasses, to admit that sometimes moving closer and trying to do good and closing the gaps between us and others doesn’t work out the way we want. But maybe it’s worth showing up anyway.”

Lacking the critical edge, I’m not always sure of what constitutes “soul music,” but I can still recognize “soul literature.”

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

GUEST COLUMN
By Shannen Dee Williams (CNS)

On Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021, the third day of Advent and the last day of Black Catholic History Month, I visited the historic Elmwood Cemetery in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, and gazed upon the gravesite of “Servant of God” Sister Thea Bowman, one of six African Americans currently under consideration for sainthood.

Although I grew up Black and Catholic, I did not learn about the existence of African American nuns until 2007, while enrolled in graduate school.

Two years later, a conversation in Memphis with then-Bishop J. Terry Steib directed me to the principal’s office of the diocese’s Holy Names of Mary and Jesus School for an interview with Sister Donna Banfield.

During our meeting, Sister Donna, who led Holy Names from 2006 to 2010, informed me of Sister Thea’s final resting place in the city.

I also learned that Sister Donna, a former president of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, led her students on an annual trip to Sister Thea’s gravesite to pay their respects and bear to witness to the lived reality of Black Catholic saints in our midst.

Inspired by Sister Donna’s leadership, I decided to make my own pilgrimage to Sister Thea’s gravesite but not until I completed my planned book on the largely hidden history of the nation’s Black sisters. I wanted the visit to be special, and it truly was.

Reflecting on Sister Thea’s short but powerful epitaph, “She tried,” etched onto her family’s headstone, I thanked her for championing the intellectual, spiritual and cultural gifts of the African American community in the face of discrimination and resistance in our church. I also thanked Sister Thea for being a model of excellence and compassion for all humankind.

“Be woman. Be man. Be priest,” Sister Thea liked to say. “Be single, be married. … Be Irish American, be Italian American, be Native American, be African American, but be one in Christ.”

In these trying times, one can only wonder what Sister Thea, an unapologetic champion of Black life, mothers, families and social equality, might say about the current state of our bitterly divided nation and church.

From the various attempts to stop the teaching of Black history and the nation’s original sins of racism and colonialism to the global climate crisis to the current attempts to roll back the civil rights victories of the middle decades of the 20th century – especially voting rights – I also wonder what advice Sister Thea, a member of the pioneering generation of Black Catholic women and girls who desegregated the nation’s white sisterhoods, would give those fearful of the uncertain future ahead.

In her final years, Sister Thea, a Mississippi native who was also the granddaughter of enslaved people, made it clear where she stood on all forms of injustice. “I will never reconcile myself with … racism … sexism … classism … anything destructive,” she stated.

Too often those who champion Sister Thea and her canonization cause erase her clear understanding of the interconnected dimensions of oppression.

In so doing, they do a terrible disservice to her and other freedom fighters, who always understood that any demand for racial and educational justice not connected to the larger fight for human rights and justice was insincere and illegitimate.

As this nation seems poised with a return to a society that Sister Thea, and so many Black sisters like her fought to bury, I pray for the strength and grace to meet the stark challenges ahead.

During this Advent season, I also pray for the wisdom to remember Sister Thea’s great sacrifice for her beliefs and the courage to seek new ways of living that no longer require martyrdom to convince opponents of human equality to uphold the church’s most basic social teaching of affirming the lives and dignity of all people.

(Shannen Dee Williams is a cradle Catholic and associate professor of history at the University of Dayton. She is the author of “Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle,” which will be published by Duke University Press on May 27, 2022. Follow her on Twitter at @BlkNunHistorian.)