Church & Colonization: Contextual Catholicism

This post is part of our Church & Colonization series. Using the themes of Advent (faith, hope, joy, and love), Re/Generation participants and CTA leaders reflect on aspects of how colonization in the United States has been intertwined with Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular.

Theme: joy

Browsing a used bookstore in my home state of Vermont, I came upon An Inland See: A Brief History of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington by Howard Coffin. Soon after I finished reading it, my friend Tess introduced her project about colonization and the Catholic Church. Immediately, I wanted to learn about the Church’s colonial presence in Vermont. Why didn’t I know very much about that history?

As Tess shared about her experience of Catholicism in small-town Montana, I thought about how the Roman Catholic Church of the East Coast does not romanticize colonial exploits in the same way: In the American West, historic mission churches and frontier mythologies keep the church’s bloody history at the surface. Even though the Church in the West depicts itself as a benevolent master — a selfless missionary for Christ and civilization rather than a genocidal invader — it’s perhaps harder to ignore the marriage of Church and colonization in the West.

In the East, we’re less likely to romanticize colonization — we just ignore it. 

Big picture, I grew up with a decontextualized Catholicism: I never thought about what it meant to be a white Catholic from Vermont. In some respects, I thought a lot about my context. I’m fortunate to have parents who raised me to be conscious of the land upon which we lived. They taught me about ecosystems, watersheds, and soil types. In school, we learned about the plants and animals with whom we share our biome. We learned a bit about the Indigenous peoples of the region, though without much reference to the violence of colonization or the state’s vigorous eugenics movement. As a child, I once said to my parents that “the Abenaki used to live here.” My dad corrected me: “the Abenaki live here. They’re not gone.” 

I was conscious of my European roots. One of my grandmothers was born in England, the other in Bavaria. Both of my grandfathers were the children or grandchildren of Ellis Island-era Italian immigrants. Since I’m not too many generations removed from Europe, I have a better sense of my ethnic identity than many white people in the United States. Ethnic identity is entwined with religious identity, so I vaguely knew where my Catholicism came from. 

Still, though, I didn’t think much about Catholicism and place. My secular education about colonialism was filtered through a white settler lens; my religious education on the matter was nonexistent. I’ve commented that my childhood church was apolitical, but decontextualized may be a better word. I didn’t even think about Catholicism in reference to Rome. Catholicism never felt bound to time or place — it was an abstract phenomenon to me. Priests and religious educators taught me about personal piety and interpersonal relationships, practical and spiritual matters. I didn’t think about what it meant to be Catholic on this land, in this white body, in this time. 

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Much of the land known as Vermont is the home of the Indigenous Abenaki people. When I pulled out An Inland See to seek references to the Abenaki or the other tribes who call parts of this land home, I didn’t find much. The book credits Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer for whom Lake Champlain is named, with opening the door to Catholicism in the region. In 1609, the book says, a group of Algonquin canoers guided his party south into the lake. One historian wrote that Champlain envisioned “the foundation in America of a great kingdom, to be ruled with justice and mercy, by France, but for God.” 

Before long, the Jesuits would follow Champlain into the region. An Inland See describes a scene from the 1991 film Black Robes, which follows a missionary priest who sets out to convert the Indigenous peoples:

In a remarkable early scene, the priest walks alone into the forest one winter morning and briefly becomes lost. While seeking his way, he looks up at the great overarching trees of a virgin forest and for a moment sees them transformed into the soaring vaults of a Gothic cathedral. 

This scene certainly is remarkable. The forest is “virgin” in that it is untouched by European hands; like a woman untouched by men, a “virginal” forest is a screen upon which the European can project a fantasy of domination and transformation. When we imagine the American wilds as untouched, otherworldly, Edenic, we erase the Indigenous peoples who left their mark here millennia before the arrival of Europeans. 

Many of us imagine forests as cathedrals; this metaphor comes to us because we have learned that cathedrals are sacred places, and since we sense the sacredness of the trees, we draw a parallel between Gothic vaults and forest canopies. The association is not inherently problematic, but in this context, it takes on a more sinister connotation. The missionary actively wants to remake the land in his own image. 

According to An Inland See, legend has it that the Jesuit St. Isaac Jogues may have been tortured by the Iroquois at Isle La Motte. Isle La Motte, an island in the far north of Lake Champlain, is now part of Vermont. The island is home to a renowned shrine to Saint Anne, a shrine that was originally built within a fort that defended Montreal from Iroquois attacks in the 1600s. Catholic geographies of the state overlay the geographies of encounter and bloodshed between Native Americans and colonizers. 

All of this content appears in the first four pages of An Inland See. As its other 173 pages do not mention Native Americans, I had to look elsewhere to learn about the Church’s impact on the Indigenous peoples of the state after the 1600s. I came upon a 2020 article in Vermont Catholic magazine about Abenaki converts to Catholicism:

To outsiders, Abenaki Catholicism might seem strange or even contradictory. Not to Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe. “Abenaki were easily converted to the Catholic religion because their spiritual practices are similar in nature,” Stevens explained. “For instance, we Abenaki believe in one God with many spirits. The Catholic religion also recognizes one God with many spirits: saints and angels. Both religions allow for those spirits to watch over them and do certain tasks for them.”

A key example is a name common among Abenakis: St. Francis. “St. Francis watches over the animals and the forests. The Abenaki ‘spirit of the woods’ performs the same function. We have songs dedicated to this spirit. The French referred to many of the Abenaki as the ‘St. Francis’ Indians, and that name is still prevalent in Missisquoi and Odanak today. So you see, the two beliefs are the same and parallel in practice.”

This article for a diocesan publication naturally approaches the subject through a Catholic lens. Still, it is striking to see the Chief characterize the two beliefs as “the same” or “parallel.” I’m generally leery of romanticizing similarities among religions. Arguments that “all religions are the same” may have good intentions in pointing to simple parallels like appeals to the common good, but they also flatten the specificity of other traditions — and if we come from a Christocentric worldview, they may lead us to unwittingly project Christian frameworks onto others. The article concludes by asking the reader to reflect upon the first two centuries of Catholicism in Vermont, but since it focuses on those Abenaki who enthusiastically adopted Catholicism, the reader isn’t encouraged to reflect upon any negative consequences of the Church’s arrival.

But reflexive criticism, even borne from a desire to condemn colonialism, lacks the necessary nuance. Catholicism became important to many Abenaki. One band of Abenaki is legally known as the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of the Sovereign Republic of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi. I imagine that the intersection of Catholicism and indigeneity might mean many things to many people. 

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The language of “negotiation” can helpfully describe identity: as we move through life, we have to respond and adapt to complex circumstances. Our identities (ethnicity/race, nationality, socioeconomic position, religion, gender, sexuality, and more) shape both our circumstances and our response to circumstances. Sometimes we experience tension between our identities. Sometimes one facet of our identity feels more salient than the others. “Negotiation” describes the process through which we understand, cultivate, and express our identities in relation to people and systems. 

I do not often negotiate between my Catholicism, my whiteness, or my identity as a Vermonter because I learned that I don’t have to do so. Whiteness, Vermont roots, and Catholicism apparently fit together so effortlessly that I never talked about what it meant to belong to all three groups. Decontextual Catholicism does not actually exist, but white Catholics are more likely to decontextualize ourselves. Decontextualization is inextricable from power. When we situate ourselves outside of place and time, we see our identities and beliefs as universal. 

This is why many white progressive Catholics are particularly politicized around gender and sexuality. As a woman, I do actively negotiate between my Catholicism and my womanhood. I experience tension in that dynamic. LGBTQ Catholics often negotiate between their gender or sexuality and their faith. We personally experience discomfort, so we process our discomfort through activism and community-building. But while we build on these shared experiences, we often naturalize, invisibilize, and decontextualize our whiteness. We ignore that we occupy Indigenous land and that we belong to a tradition that sought to remake that land in its own image. 

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The third week of Advent focuses on joy. Joy is the most visible theme of the Advent season because we represent it with a sole pink candle in our Advent wreath. Reading about the symbolism of the Advent colors, I learned that purple interrupted by a glimpse of pink was transposed from Lent onto Advent. As one article put it, “the third Advent candle was selected to be a reminder of the spirit of Lent, with its mixture of joys and sorrows and in particular its joy of the resurrection.”

As I reflect upon contextualization, I wonder if contextualization can be a source of joy. When we go to therapy, we try to understand ourselves better so that we can live more joyful lives. By exploring and naming the things that hurt us, we understand ourselves as relational beings. People hurt us. Systems of oppression hurt us. Therapy can’t surgically remove our pain, but it can contextualize it. Like healing, contextualization is not linear. It is a process of situating ourselves in stories that stretch back centuries, even millennia. I learned a little bit about how colonizers brought Catholicism to Vermont and how Indigenous peoples have interacted with the tradition, but that’s just a snapshot of a much longer narrative. 

When we understand ourselves, we’ve laid the groundwork to be at peace with ourselves. We can both acknowledge our failings and take pride in who we are. This is a sustainable foundation for joy. “Whiteness,” the lumping of ethnic distinction into one homogenous category, prevents people of European descent from understanding our roots. We are taught to decontextualize ourselves, trading specificity and identity for power. 

It is painful for white people to re-contextualize ourselves. It will not (and should not) always make us happy; we must reckon with ugly legacies. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the pink candle originally represents joy amid suffering. Joy will not spring forth from nowhere. We cannot move forward by denying the past; pain and joy are entwined.

Long-term, though, contextualization is a source of joy on both an individual and systemic level. It can replace individual and collective denial. It does not condemn us as humans; it urges us to understand who we are, how we move through the world, and how the world came to be as it is. As we deepen our understanding of ourselves, our ancestors, and our communities, we can build on our new understanding. We can name violence without looking away. We can pull out the liberating and life-giving threads. This is a form of resurrection. 

Joyful communities are communities that understand themselves and their relationships to other communities. They know they are flawed, but they also know that they are striving to be good. We need to learn about the histories of colonization, the complex specificities of the land on which we live. No matter how we relate to those histories, we need to learn where our faith comes from. The more that Catholics understand ourselves as contextual Catholics, the more joyful — and just — our world can become.