Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of “What We Have Seen and Heard,” a pastoral letter on evangelization written by the nation’s Black bishops in 1984, by calling the landmark document “an ambitious undertaking” that encouraged Black Catholics to embrace “the vital task of evangelization and deepening cultural pride in the gifts that God has bestowed upon us.”
“We acknowledged that the time had come for people of color to seize the reins in charting our future within the Church by recognizing the treasure of our culture and heritage and offering those gifts wholeheartedly to the Church we loved,” Cardinal Gregory, one of the 10 bishops who cowrote the document four decades ago, said in commemorating the anniversary.
Cardinal Gregory spoke about the groundbreaking pastoral letter during a Sept. 12 Mass he celebrated for about 40 priests and 20 deacons of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. The Mass – offered at St. Joseph Church in Upper Marlboro, Maryland – was concelebrated by Washington Auxiliary Bishops Roy E. Campbell, Jr., Juan R. Esposito-Garcia and Evelio Menjivar-Ayala.
On Sept. 9, 1984, “What We Have Seen and Heard: A Pastoral Letter on Evangelization from the Black Bishops of the United States” was issued. In the pastoral, the bishops stressed that “as Black Americans and Black Catholics, it is time for us to reclaim our roots and to shoulder the responsibilities of being both Black and Catholic.”
Because “we have heard with Black ears and we have seen with Black eyes and we have understood with an African heart,” the bishops wrote that Black Catholics must share their culture with the Church and “witness to our brothers and sisters within the Black community that the Catholic Church is both one and also home to us all.”
At the anniversary Mass, Cardinal Gregory said that he and his brother bishops “wrote as Black men first of all to our own Black sisters and brothers as well as to our Church at large.”
“It was an important moment, and this was something that needed to be done, and I am just glad that I could be involved in it,” the cardinal said.
Among the 10 bishops who coauthored “What We Have Seen and Heard,” the future cardinal archbishop of Washington was the youngest at 36 years of age. At the time, he was serving as an auxiliary bishop of Chicago. Cardinal Gregory later served as the bishop of Belleville, Illinois, and then as the archbishop of Atlanta before being appointed as the archbishop of Washington in 2019 and named by Pope Francis as a cardinal the next year.
In addition to Cardinal Gregory, the other co-authors of “What We Have Seen and Heard” were Bishop Joseph L. Howze, then the bishop of Biloxi, Mississippi; Bishop Harold R. Perry, then an auxiliary bishop of New Orleans; Bishop Eugene A. Marino, then an auxiliary bishop of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington; Bishop Joseph A. Francis, then an auxiliary bishop of Newark, New Jersey; Bishop James P. Lyke, then an auxiliary bishop of Cleveland, Ohio; Bishop Emerson J. Moore, then an auxiliary bishop of New York; Bishop Moses B. Anderson, then an auxiliary bishop of Detroit; Bishop J. Terry Steib, then an auxiliary bishop of St. Louis; and Bishop John Ricard, then an auxiliary bishop of Baltimore.
“We were as diverse in our backgrounds as any such group might have been,” the cardinal said, adding that despite their different backgrounds “we had all shared the same experience of being people of color in a nation with scant firsthand Catholic experience of the souls of Black folks.”
The title of the pastoral letter comes from 1 John 1:3 – “What we have seen and heard
we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
It was issued on the Feast of St. Peter Claver, who ministered to Africans who were enslaved and who referred to himself as “the slave of the slaves forever.”
“We write to you, Black brothers and sisters, because each one of us is called to a special task. The Holy Spirit now calls all to the work of evangelization,” the bishops wrote in that pastoral letter. “There is a richness in our Black experience that we must share with the entire People of God.”
In his homily, Cardinal Gregory said that recognizing and celebrating the gifts Black Catholics bring to the Church “is not a source of vanity as much as it is a prayer of thanksgiving for what God has fashioned in creating each of us.”
“We recognized that we have much to offer to the Church that we loved and serve,” the cardinal said.
In calling for Black Catholics to evangelize, the pastoral letter stressed, “We have many gifts from our African past that we must share. Our Blackness is a gift as well as our Catholic faith. By sharing we will enrich our community, our Church and ourselves.
“The Black presence in the American Catholic Church is a precious witness to the universal character of Catholicism. The Catholic Church, however, must preserve its multicultural identity. In this country it must reflect the richness of African-American history and its heritage. This is our gift to the Church in the United States,” the letter states.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center found there are approximately 3 million Black Catholics in the United States, comprising about 4 percent of all Catholics in this country.
In pointing out that “What We Have Seen and Heard” challenges Black Catholics to evangelize, Cardinal Gregory said, “We have much to gain by welcoming our sisters and brothers into this family of faith.”
“Evangelization is the effort enthusiastically to gather as many people as possible into the embrace of Christ’s Church – not by pressure or force or coercion – but by lived examples of loving service,” he said.
While the letter focuses on evangelization, the bishops also wrote that witnessing to the faith means “denouncing racism as a sin while fighting for justice and inner renewal.”
“The causes of justice and social concern are an essential part of evangelization. To preach to the powerful without denouncing oppression is to trivialize the Gospel,” the bishops said in that letter, adding, “As Black people we must have concern for those who hunger and thirst for justice throughout the world. We must not ignore those whom others tend to forget... This is the essence of evangelization itself.”
In his homily, Cardinal Gregory said each of the bishop authors of “What We Have Seen and Heard” was “inspired by the loving examples of those pioneer sisters, priests, deacons and lay folk in mission to the Black community.”
“We wanted to assume leadership along with the clergy, religious and laity who shared with us the responsibilities of helping the Church grow within the ranks of people of color everywhere in our nation,” he said.
During the Mass, prayers were offered for those who have “the duty, joy and privilege” of sharing the faith with others, for the living and deceased authors of “What We Have Seen and Heard,” and for the advancement of the canonization causes of six African American Catholics who causes for sainthood have been opened. Those six are: Venerable Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, the foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, the first Catholic order of African American women religious; Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, the first U.S. Catholic priest publicly known to be Black and who served as a parish priest in Chicago; Venerable Mother Henriette Delille of New Orleans, who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, Venerable Pierre Toussaint, a philanthropist and founder of many Catholic charitable works in New York; Servant of God Julia Greeley, who was born into slavery and after her emancipation later moved to Denver, where she became Catholic and was known for her devout faith; and Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, a native of Mississippi who converted to Catholicism and later became a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration and was nationally known as a dynamic evangelist before she died of cancer in 1990.
In addition to Cardinal Gregory, there are two other living Black Catholic bishops who coauthored “What We Have Seen and Heard:” Bishop Steib, now the retired bishop of Memphis, Tennessee; and Bishop Ricard, now the retired bishop of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Florida, who in recent years as served as the superior general of the Josephite order.
After the Mass, Cardinal Gregory gathered for lunch with the priests and deacons and reflected on the publication of “What We Have Seen and Heard.”
He said that two of the authors – the late Bishop Lyke and the late Bishop Francis – “probably drove the actual text. They were kind of like two engines pushing us along.”
He added that the 10 bishops independently published the original pastoral letter through a Franciscan publishing company and not through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“It was our text, we didn’t go through the USCCB,” Cardinal Gregory said. “The USCCB was generous in supporting it, but it was our (Black bishops’) document. We wanted this not to be a document in response to crisis, but a document in response to possibilities.”
Speaking on the push-back and resistance from some who do not want the Church to teach about its racist past, Cardinal Gregory said that the faithful must acknowledge that part of the history of the Church in the United States.
“I don’t want them to feel bad, but I want them to know the truth because, as you know, ‘The truth shall set you free,’” he said.
Reflecting on the letter four decades later, the cardinal said “there’s a lot of things in the document that have not been implemented – not because there hasn’t been follow through... but because it is kind of hit and miss. Evangelization is not something you do just once. It is something you do constantly, like breathing.”
He said Catholic schools are an important vehicle for evangelization, and “we have to find ways of engaging our young people through our schools, our religious education programs and our parishes.”
“We’ve got to be creative in finding ways not just to engage the kids, but also their parents. We shouldn’t proselytize, but we should ask” people to think about joining the Church,” Cardinal Gregory said. “We have to spread the arms of welcome so wide that everyone fits.”
