As American Catholics, we need to reshape our relationship to land.

Map of the British Colonies in North America - New York Public Library Digital Collections

Join Tess for a December 14 event on “Rethinking our relationship to stolen land.”

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 

For numberless millennia, human beings lived in deep relationship with the earth, which we were and remain totally dependent upon for physical survival. Even as civilization emerged, across the world many ordinary people organized their lives around the land – what they could grow and gather from it, where land could provide them opportunities to fish, and to hunt. 

The connection with land was simultaneously temporal and spiritual. Somatic practitioner Staci K. Haynes writes, “throughout most of human history, our deep relatedness to the earth and stars was reflected in our cosmologies and social and religious practices.” Many ancient and contemporary religions include worship of the sun and the moon, as well as spirits and deities relating to weather, plants and animals, water, and the ground.

I see reverence for land and the natural world in the bones of Catholicism, too. I think of the three wise men and their relationship with the night sky, and how that led them to encounter the infant Jesus. I think of grottos and shrines to the Black Madonna in early Christian Europe, many of which are thought to have been built on previous sites for worship of earth goddesses. I think of the Rule of St. Benedict and the Divine Office, in which the turn of the planet dictates both prayer and time. Dawn, noon, evening, midnight.

Several hundred years ago, Western Christianity started to decouple body and soul – and in so hewing, split heaven and earth, land and spirit. Many major historical events and philosophical/theological paradigm shifts contributed to this, including the emergence of Cartesian dualism and the papal bulls of the Age of Discovery. 

The devastating effects wrought by the separation of physical and spiritual include colonialism, flawed understanding of gender and sexuality, and environmental degradation. I believe it is also what has allowed many American Catholics today to forget about the power of land.

“Yes, I say, you will find me, and I will restore you to your land. I will gather you from every country and from every place to which I have scattered you, and I will bring you back to the land from which I had sent you away into exile. I, the Lord, have spoken.” (Jeremiah 29:14)

Land is the foundation of political, economic, and cultural power. At its most basic level political control is control over land, control both drawn from and exerted over resources, landscape, and people. Catholic areas of medieval Europe had in practice two rulers – the laws of the King and the laws of the Church, which regulated marriage, enforced religious observances such as Lent, and administered separate church courts for lawsuits involving clergymen. The land and influence the Church held imbued it with the ability to create rules.

Conversely, dominion over one’s own land creates autonomy. Frantz Fanon wrote that “for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” This is well-illustrated by post-revolution Cuba, where redistributing a large portion of the farmland previously held by plantation owners and American interests to peasants gave them a radically different level of control over their own livelihoods.

Land has traditionally held potent cultural significance. People across the world have spiritual touchstones in land – everything from pilgrimage cities to sacred mountains to holy wells. Many cultures bury their dead in the ground, returning the body into the land. 

Before the colonial era, land ownership was not a universal paradigm. Many non-European peoples considered themselves stewards of land rather than owners of land, with profound cultural consequences. This reverence for land created a value of the natural world and its ecosystems, and an attitude of learning rather than subduing. Sherri Mitchell – Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset (Penobscot) shares the Indigenous wisdom that “human beings are the youngest species on the planet” and there is much to gain by allowing the land to teach and take the lead.

“You covet fields, and seize them;
houses, and take them;
You cheat owners of their houses,
people of their inheritance.” (Micah 2:2)

If land is understood as economic, political, and cultural power, colonialism must be understood as theft, hegemony, and supremacy. As European colonialism spread across the globe, centers of empire took away resources from the places and people they belonged to – everything from tea in India to natural minerals in Australia to sugar in the Caribbean. In the case of the British empire, this practice of exporting the wealth of land had been workshopped in Ireland, where the system of absentee landlords meant that English and Scottish Protestants residing outside of Ireland frequently held and profited off land Irish Catholics actually lived on but did not own. 

In the Americas, land theft is of course most vividly illustrated by Europeans invading and seizing the lands of Indigenous peoples, cordoning off reservations deemed “theirs” while declaring the rest of the land “ours,” attempting to wipe out Indigenous peoples actively through violence, and passively through disease and disenfranchisement. Church missions and residential schools were planted into the ground where the ancestors of the Indigenous people they imprisoned once thrived. These were sites of cultural supremacy and control, as the (often forcible) assimilation of Indigenous peoples would mean neutralizing the potential to reclaim the lands these structures were built on.

To lack control of land is to lack autonomy and power. After the Civil War, the massive scale of land redistribution for formerly enslaved people envisioned in the call for forty acres and a mule did not take place – many freed people found themselves trapped in cycles of debt and wage labor which hindered progressing toward greater equality and self-determination. The control of land through redlining also impacted Black Americans in the 20th century. These polices sliced into land, separating by race who would get prosperity, and who would grasp for it. Today, private ownership of land continues to tell that story – 856 million acres are owned by white people, 7 million by Black people, and 3 million by Indigenous people.

“If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours?” (Luke 16:11-12)

Colonialism is not over, it is still happening – resources of the many continue to be extracted and hoarded by the few. The perhaps quintessential example is the harvesting of the richness of the Amazon rainforest for cattle ranching and cash crop farming, at the expense of the natural ecosystem and the traditional ways of life of the area’s Indigenous peoples. These people and places will, in turn, suffer most from the climate changes caused by this economic development, without receiving any of its benefit. 

Pope Francis has been critical of bishops and other church officials who engage in a culture of lavish spending, but what that comparatively modest attitude reveals is that globally the Church has access to a lot of resources – including ownership of a great amount of land. Globally, the Catholic Church is thought to own 177 million acres of land – this includes not only churches and monasteries, but also assorted properties ranging from forests and farmlands to vacant properties and oil wells. 

The exact income and assets of the Catholic Church in the United States are not entirely clear, but according to the Economist as of 2010 the US Church owned at least 6,800 Catholic schools, 630 hospitals, and 244 colleges and universities. The Archdiocese of New York is thought to be the largest landowner in Manhattan, when the churches, organizations, and other properties in the borough are all totaled up. 

Can the Church justify controlling these resources and their benefits, considering they consist of lands historically seized from Indigenous peoples to make up a nation built by enslaved labor and other forms of exploitation? Can we really in good moral conscience say that all this Church land is “our” land, considering the laws of this country were designed to justify that exploitation, and protect those who gain from it? What responsibility does the Church have to steward these lands justly – and what would land justice and decolonization look like for the Church?

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.” (Leviticus 25:23)

In giving up ill-gotten wealth and worldly forms of power, we can more closely follow Jesus. It’s time to figure out how the Church can let the land go. Buildings could be relinquished and turned into housing, especially in cities with unprecedented crises of homelessness. Assets could be sold to raise funds for reparations – for the descendants of enslaved people, and for others the Church has harmed. 

Land could be repatriated to Indigenous people, at long last. There is recent precedent for churches doing this – the ELCA Rocky Mountain Synod in Denver, CO transferred land to the Four Winds American Indian Council, and the United Methodist Church’s Oregon-Idaho Conference returned land to the Nez Perce Tribe. In 2017 the St. Francis Mission in South Dakota returned over 500 acres of land to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.

Letting go of power and relinquishing land is emotional, and the work of decolonization is so hard. Nevertheless we must undergo this transformation – it’s the only way to at last live in right relationship with one another, and the Earth.