In a prayer service filled with the soulful music, personal witness of faith and heartfelt prayer that marked the life and work of Sister Thea Bowman, Georgetown University on May 3 commemorated the renaming of a chapel in her honor.

Georgetown University’s president, John J. DeGioia, in an April 27 letter to the university community had announced that the renamed chapel in Copley Hall would now be known as the Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman Chapel of St. William. The newly renovated chapel, a consecrated Catholic chapel and the spiritual home for the university’s Protestant community, had long been known as the St. William Chapel, named after St. William of Vercelli who lived from 1085 to 1142 and founded monasteries in Italy. 

Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration and a dynamic evangelist and educator who championed racial justice and the role of Black Catholics in the Church, died of cancer in 1990. She is one of six Black Catholics from the United States whose causes for sainthood are under consideration.

Four days earlier, The Catholic University of America held a ceremony where it was announced that a street on campus next to its Columbus School of Law would be renamed as Thea Bowman Drive. Sister Thea earned a master’s and doctorate degree in English at Catholic University.

The May 3 ecumenical prayer service at the Georgetown University chapel included readings and prayers by Catholic and Protestant students and two Baptist ministers who serve at Georgetown, and a reflection by Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory.

Addressing the prayer service, DeGioia noted that Sister Thea Bowman received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University and she spoke to a convocation for first-year students there in September 1989, a few months before her death.

“She called on them to use their time as students and all that they gained in their education to advance the common good. The strength of her conviction and the impact of her words and example are just as vital to us today as they were three decades ago,” he said.

In his letter about the renaming of the chapel, DeGioia noted that the university in the past decade has renovated the Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart and the St. William Chapel, and also renovated the Copley Crypt, a worship space for the Catholic and Orthodox communities there. In addition, the university dedicated a meditation center for its Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh communities, moved its Muslim prayer space to a larger location, and also installed a Torah Ark in the worship space for its Jewish community. A committee of staff, students and faculty met to propose a new name for the St. William Chapel.

DeGioia said that “in recommending Sister Thea Bowman for the name of this chapel, the committee reflected on the contributions that she made during her lifetime, her vibrant Christian faith, her Protestant roots, her joining the Catholic community and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, her courage in calling the Catholic Church and our nation to more fully engage with Black Catholics and to reject racism, her academic background and role in establishing scholarship around the Black Catholic experience, her embrace of music as a form of ministry, and her faith-filled service and witness in living the Gospel.”

During the prayer service Alice Kukapa, a Catholic student at Georgetown, read excerpts from Sister Thea’s electrifying 1989 address to the nation’s Catholic bishops. Weakened by cancer and sitting in a wheelchair, Sister Thea in a soaring voice told the bishops about the journey of faith of Black Catholics and the importance of welcoming their gifts in the Church.

Reading Sister Thea’s words from that address, Kukapa said, “The Church teaches us that the Church is a family of families, and the family (has) got to stay together… If we walk and talk and work and play and stand together in Jesus’s name, we’ll be who we are, truly Catholic, and we shall overcome, overcome the poverty, overcome the loneliness, overcome the alienation and build together a holy city, a new Jerusalem, a city set apart where they’ll know that we are here because we love one another.”

In his reflection at the prayer service, Cardinal Gregory noted that he instructed all the seminarians in The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington to watch Sister Thea’s presentation to the bishops, and to view it in small groups and watch each other’s reaction and reflect together on her message to the Church.

The cardinal said that when Sister Thea said, “I bring my whole self” to the Church, she was drawing on her African heritage and her American experience, and that is likewise the challenge for all Americans, to draw on their legacies.

“Once Thea had thoroughly commingled all of her personal elements, she brought them and presented them to the Church that she loved, as a precious gift,” he said.

Those gifts from its members enrich the Church, Cardinal Gregory said.

“Roman Catholicism is improved with each contribution of the peoples who become a part of this family of faith,” he said.

Washington’s archbishop noted how Sister Thea learned a lesson and shared it about being “comfortable with who you are, and bring that identity to God who gave it to you in the first place.”

“Christ invites each one of us to be comfortable with our identity and to bring that identity into the Church,” the cardinal said. “…We are most Church when we are together, sisters and brothers, culturally and racially diverse, representing all age groups and backgrounds.”

Concluding his reflection, Cardinal Gregory said, “Thea admonished all of us to bring our whole self to the Church that we love and bless it with our unique individuality and gifts and learn to respect and treasure the gifts of those who come from other backgrounds, because together we are the Church Christ wants us to be.”

During the prayer service, the cardinal blessed a large black-and-white smiling portrait of Sister Thea Bowman, sprinkling it with holy water.

Rev. Ebony Grisom, the interim director of Protestant Ministry at Georgetown, read the Gospel reading from Matthew 5:1-12, the Beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Another Baptist minister, Rev. TauVaughn Toney, a Protestant Christian chaplain there, led people in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

The closing prayer was recited by Sister Helen Elsbernd, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration who was a classmate of Sister Thea and went through the postulancy and novitiate with her. They made their final vows together and later served on the faculty of the order’s St. Viterbo College (now University) in La Crosse, Wisconsin, with Sister Helen then serving as academic dean and Sister Thea heading the English department.

In an interview before the prayer service, Sister Helen said, “She (Sister Thea) was a very vivacious person. She really had a heart for the person who was alone and struggling.”

Also before the prayer service, Sister Barbara Spears, a member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and the past president of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, said the lesson of Sister Thea’s life was “Do what she did. Keep the faith and work for others. Embrace your own faith and history and share that with others, in the name of justice.”

Later speaking at the prayer service, she said that Sister Thea lived out her call to follow Jesus and love and serve God and others until the day she died, even teaching students from her sick bed.

Concluding her remarks, Sister Barbara said, “While it is great to name buildings, schools, chapels and streets (after someone), all those things are important and we appreciate it, but the thing that really matters is that we keep Thea’s memory alive by the way we live and continue to work for justice for the oppressed.”

The service closed with the singing of one of Sister Thea’s favorite spirituals, “This Little Light of Mine.”

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