Baptized by blackness: manumittive baptisms in antebellum Georgia & Black Catholicism's sacramental subversion of an antiblack world

Ward, Michael

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120287 Copy

Description

Title

Baptized by blackness: manumittive baptisms in antebellum Georgia & Black Catholicism's sacramental subversion of an antiblack world

Author(s)

Ward, Michael

Issue Date

2023-04-20

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Williams, Alexia

Department of Study

Religion

Discipline

Religion

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Black Catholicism
• Black Freedom
• early American Catholicism
• Black liberation theology
• sacrament of baptism
• manumission
• antiblackness
• womanist theology

Abstract

From 1797 to 1801 something unprecedented in the history of American Catholicism takes place in Savannah, Georgia. There, under the ecclesial leadership of Fr. Olivier LeMercier, nine enslaved Black Catholic children are simultaneously baptized and manumitted from enslavement. This thesis relies on key contextual clues and multiple theoretical movements to assert how the manumittive baptisms are clear examples of colonial baptisms that subvert both the antebellum laws of Georgia, but also the American Catholic Church. Specifically, four pre-1801 baptisms use Georgian law to secure political freedom. These four legally binding manumissions by baptism subvert the American Catholic Church’s anti-Abolitionist interpretation of baptism. However, amid Georgia’s Manumission Act of 1801 five baptisms use the sacramental register of the Catholic Church as a manumission act that declares sacramental freedom, subverts Georgian law, and going forward, relies on the Catholic Church for political protection. By securing subversive freedom—both six legally binding and three functionally free—for the Black Catholic children, the baptisms function as sacramental subversions. Specifically, the enslaved Black Catholic mothers’ sacramental subversiveness is that which risks the sacramental gift of freedom to secure further religious and political freedom in and through the Sacramental Life of the Church. This, the manumittive baptisms’ sacramental subversiveness unveil how the sacramental life of the Catholic Church has been a source of colonial antiblack violence, paradoxical black experiments of freedom, and fundamental to the American Catholic Church’s formation as “a white, racist institution.” The political function of the nine manumittive baptisms demonstrate how sacramental subversiveness is born out of revolution against the sacramental antiblackness of the colonial Catholic Church, has historically provided a paradoxical path forward in the struggle for Black Catholic freedom, and unveils how the American Catholic Church maintains an antiblack world via its sacramental whiteness. Going forward, the baptisms’ sacramental subversiveness unveils how participation in the sacramental life of the Catholic Church requires a costly and collective conversion to sacramental blackness and its metaphysical transformation of an antiblack world. This conversion begins with the center of the Catholic Church’s sacramental life—the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Michael Ward

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