Transforming a Tainted Legacy

The USCCB's New Pastoral Framework for Indigenous Ministry

At their annual June Plenary Assembly, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) unveiled a new national pastoral framework for ministry to Native and Indigenous peoples, Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise: A Pastoral Framework for Indigenous Ministry. The document was drafted by the USCCB’s Subcommittee on Native American Affairs, currently headed by Bishop Chad Zielinski of New Ulm, Minnesota. The new pastoral framework is the first major document from the USCCB focusing on the United States’ Native population in decades, coming almost fifty years after 1977’s Statement of U.S. Catholic Bishops on American Indians.

Although the long wait is disappointing, it is evident that a lot of care went into the drafting of Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise. As the document’s preface notes, the process leading up to its publication extended just over five years and included consultations with Catholic Native leaders, a point to which I will return. The document itself takes a comprehensive approach to the Church’s pastoral responsibilities to Native and Indigenous peoples, including evangelization and catechesis, inculturation, and a commitment to address the legacy of past injustices and to accompany Native peoples in addressing the injustices of the present. The document is well worth the read for theologians and those engaged in ministry, and it could be an excellent resource in the classroom.

Before looking in more depth at Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise, I want to address a question of terminology. The nomenclature used to refer to the Indigenous peoples of the United States is contested and has changed over time, as the USCCB’s own usage, noted above, demonstrates: the earlier document from 1977 referred to “American Indians,” the USCCB subcommittee responsible for the new document is focused on the affairs of “Native Americans,” and Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise addresses the needs of “Native” and “Indigenous” peoples. The document itself tackles this issue of nomenclature in a footnote:

For consistency, this document prefers to apply the term “Indigenous” to Native or aboriginal peoples in general, not to particular groups. U.S. Indigenous Catholic leaders also expressed a preference for the term “Indigenous” during a listening session with Catholic bishops in 2019. This usage is also consistent with Vatican terminology. The term “Native” (e.g., “Native American,” “Native Peoples,” “Native youth,” “Native Catholics”) is also acceptable and is commonly used to refer to these populations. For the purposes of this document, the terms “Indigenous” and “Native” are interchangeable, reflecting that people might prefer one or the other.

I will follow the bishops’ example in this article and use “Indigenous” and “Native” interchangeably. The same note also explains that the document includes those who identify as “American Indian,” “Alaskan Native,” “Native Hawaiian,” and “Pacific Islander” under the umbrella of “Indigenous peoples,” following the lead of the U.S. Census Bureau.

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One of the strengths of Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise is that it grapples with the fact that the Catholic Church’s outreach to the Native populations of the United States, stretching back to colonial times, involves a tainted legacy, including the theological and moral complexities that come with that fact. Earlier this month, I interviewed Karen Guth, the author of The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts, who defines a tainted legacy as an instance in which an individual or institution that contributes a substantial good to society is found to have perpetrated, or been complicit in, a great evil, tainting that individual or institution’s influence on society. In her work, Guth addresses the legacy of individuals like the theologian John Howard Yoder and entertainment figures like Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, all of whom engaged in sexual violence against women, but also institutions like Georgetown University, whose historical origins were tied to the institution of slavery.

Guth’s treatment of tainted legacies provides a helpful lens for reading Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise. The latter is open and honest about the Catholic Church’s complicity in the injustices perpetrated against Native peoples in the United States (and in fact make significant use of the language of “trauma” that is also central to Guth’s account of tainted legacies). For example, the document notes the role of papal teaching in the development during colonial times of the so-called “doctrine of discovery” used to justify the enslavement and removal of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas (the subject of recent joint statement by the Vatican’s Dicasteries for Promoting Integral Human Development and for Culture and Education). The document also explains that the Church’s evangelizing efforts were tainted by their association with colonialism: “Honest missionary efforts to communicate the Gospel were often tarnished by the mistreatment of Indigenous people by settlers, colonizing powers, and even representatives of the Church” (12).

The new pastoral framework likewise recounts the Catholic Church’s role in running a number of boarding schools for Native children (some associated with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the majority not), many of which engaged in a process of “Americanizing” children in which they “were forced to abandon their traditional languages, dress, and customs” (9) and were separated from their families and communities. As I will explain in more detail later, Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise insists that the Church today has a responsibility to work with Native peoples to address the continued effects of the broader legacy of injustice, such as continuing racism, high rates of poverty among Native populations, lack of access to health care, epidemics of suicide and alcoholism, and the environmental degradation of tribal lands.

“Coeur d'Alene Tribe Children at Sacred Heart Mission, circa 1910 - DeSmet, Idaho” (Photo: Steve Shook, CC BY 2.0).

That being said, Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise insists that the Church’s historical efforts to evangelize the Native peoples of the United States reflect a core part of the Church’s vocation and contributed substantial goods to Native communities, primarily by introducing them to the Gospel, but also through providing education and charitable efforts to address poverty. The document also notes that often Indigenous communities eagerly welcomed missionaries into their communities and actively spread the Gospel themselves. It adds, “Today, many North American Indigenous Catholics trace their faith to the decision of their ancestors to embrace Catholicism hundreds of years ago” (5). The Church’s pastoral outreach to Native communities, according to Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise, continues to be an essential task, and naturally a significant portion of the pastoral framework focuses on issues like sacramental preparation, fostering devotion to the Eucharist, family ministries, and the catechesis of children.

In our interview, Guth pointed out that tainted legacies only raise ethical challenges when there are real, substantial goods at stake; if a legacy contributes nothing of value to society, then it can simply be abandoned. Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise recognizes that many Indigenous peoples have simply rejected Christianity, viewing it as too closely tied to their historical oppression, with some seeking a revival of the traditional spiritual practices of their people. The bishops even suggest that the Church should seek to understand and respect this perspective, even while continuing to strengthen existing Native Catholic communities and to reach out to others through evangelization.

To that end, Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise places a great deal of emphasis on the inculturation of the Gospel. It states:

[T]he authentic Catholic approach to evangelization is predicated on the idea that all cultures are open to the truth of the Gospel. The Catholic Church teaches that within each culture is found goodness, planted there by God for the benefit of his children, a rich soil in which the Gospel can take root and bloom. (12)

In Parts III and IV of the document, it provides several examples of how the Church’s faith and worship could be better inculturated in Native and Indigenous communities. These include the use of culturally appropriate music and dance in the Eucharistic liturgy, the incorporation of certain rituals of healings or of veneration of the dead as sacramentals, and the inclusion of Indigenous conceptions of sacred space in the design of churches.

Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise recognizes, however, that the Church’s ministry to Native and Indigenous peoples must not only include the inculturation of the Gospel; it demands a response to the Church’s tainted legacy in its historical relationship with these populations, and the document proposes the outlines of such a response.