An alternative vision of the global Church emerges if we begin outside the periphery and study not the missionaries but the missionized, who themselves became the salt of the earth.
In April at the Cushwa Center 50th anniversary conference, Catholic Modernity in the Americas, José Casanova delivered a keynote address on the three phases of the globalization of Catholicism. In the first phase, Jesuit missions created networks that spanned the globe and, Casanova argued, transformed the Church. For example, the Jesuit governing structure created pockets of Catholicism relatively free of royal influence, a condition necessary for the emergence from within the Church of an awareness of global humanity and a related critique of colonial domination. “No other group, and you can correct me . . . no other group contributed as much as they did to global connectivity between peoples and cultures of the world, north and south, east and west, and to global consciousness.” The second and third phases, treated more briefly, saw the creation of the independent state churches in relative isolation from Rome (in the 19th century) and the development of new theologies, based on what Casanova called the “globalization of fraternity,” as they became aware of themselves as members of a global church (in the 20th century).
Casanova’s keynote was generative for me, especially his provocative call to find another group so globalizing as the Jesuits. For Casanova, the globalization of the Church was defined as the geographic spread of people and the faith, and the transformations in structure and thought within the Church that followed. His choice to lecture on globalization rather than on modernity, the conference theme, was intentional. For him, the framework of globalization avoided the Western-centric values implicit in the study of modernity. Moreover, he argued, globalization is simply a more Catholic category than modernity, as the process of spreading across the globe is exactly the Church’s great commission.
I would like to propose an alternative to Casanova’s vision of the globalizing and global Church. If we wish to study the Church’s mission to be the “instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth,” shouldn’t we begin outside the periphery?1 Rather than studying the missionaries, I will study the missionized who themselves became the salt of the earth: the African Catholics of the colonial era. Thousands of Africans who bore the name of Christ crossed the Atlantic Ocean; millions of African and African-descent Christians lived and died in the Americas. I will add to Casanova’s geographic definition of the globalization of the Church.2
Atlantic slavery stimulated commercial production and trade on an unprecedented global scale and scope; it institutionalized human horrors; and it also served as an instrument for the spreading of Catholic people and the faith. The Church’s globalization is its transformation by this global economy. I will consider the theological fruit of the African globalization of the Church. Christ in the gospels gave his apostles an image for the Christian life, the grafting on of humanity to the vine of Christ. A graft draws its life from the rootstock. A graft also transforms the entire plant, which now bears the graft’s fruit on that particular branch. I will show that the spread of Christianity by and to African Christians in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds embedded the Church more deeply in its own traditions. African Catholicism also bore new fruit for the Church, in the communion and brotherhood of African Catholics, in their pious works, and especially in their theological reflections about themselves.
The story of the evangelization and diaspora of African Catholics is wrapped up in the story of the Catholic Atlantic slave trade, so we must begin there.
The Catholic Atlantic slave trade and African Catholics
The institution of the Atlantic slave trade was created and expanded out of Portuguese diplomatic accords with African kings, who provided slaves, always originally foreigners or non-subject people, to the Portuguese. Looming in the background was a papal bull that granted the Portuguese the rights of trade and “patronage” (stewardship of the church) in Africa and the right to subdue to perpetual slavery any “Saracens and all other infidels” they encountered.3 The papal bull and its internal logic were less important to the Portuguese than the stipulations of their many agreements with African monarchs, and so the Portuguese traded many people who were in fact members of their same faith.4 Between 1514 and 1866, slave traders trafficked thousands of enslaved Catholics out of Africa and into the Americas and Europe. Baptized African Catholics were enslaved and traded despite formal prohibitions against traffic of Catholics by papal fiat, the express wishes of African Catholic rulers, and Portuguese law.
The majority of Catholic Africans had become Catholic not by way of clerical missionary activity but by state-building and the extraordinary activity of lay catechists. Portuguese merchant and missionary activity spread kernels of the faith to Africa’s Atlantic islands and across the Atlantic coast of Africa. This was the first time on the continent that Catholicism had spread beyond the early Christian experience in North Africa.5 The most extraordinary spread of the faith occurred in the kingdom of Kongo (spread across today’s Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo). Between 1491 and 1519, Kongo consolidated itself as the first self-proclaimed Catholic kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, the Kongolese nobility invested in Catholic intellectual education and a native church led by Kongolese priests.6 In the virtual absence of European missionaries, lay Kongolese Catholics sustained the faith by their feast day traditions, membership in lay confraternities, rigorous catechesis, and even their clothing choices.7 According to the SlaveVoyages database, approximately 3 million enslaved people were trafficked out of the most heavily Catholicized region of Africa (the ports of West Central Africa, through which passed Catholic subjects of the kingdom of Kongo and the neighboring kingdoms of Ndongo and Portuguese Angola).8
African Catholics and the institutional Church
Despite the pretensions of Catholic monarchs and Catholic investors in slavery, most enslaved people in the Catholic Americas (Spanish, Portuguese, and French dominions) received only the minimum of the Church’s pastoral care, its sacraments, or its life as the Bride of Christ. Whether enslaved people had access to Catholic images and catechesis, the practice of Sunday rest, or the protections for the vulnerable embedded in the Catholic tradition depended on many factors: the Church’s own institutional strength, the moral education of slave owners, the urban setting or the possibility of communication with the city, the kind of labor demanded of the enslaved, the presence of sympathetic missionaries, and of course, enslaved people’s prior exposure to and interest in these features of Catholic life. In my own research on late-18th-century Santo Domingo (a Spanish and Catholic colony and today, the Dominican Republic), many slave owners failed to provision the people they owned with food and clothing. Some households lacked a crucifix, and in others, enslaved people were not permitted to assist at Mass or receive Christian instruction.9 In the backlands hours or days away from any baptismal font, enslaved midwives baptized newborn children in distress.10 In woods and mountains, fugitive enslaved people, both African and criollo (American-born), established free communities and freedom zones where Catholics preserved Catholicism alongside other beliefs. For example, in the palenque (fugitive community) of Limón in the province of Cartagena (today, Colombia) in the 17th century, self-freed Catholics buried their fellow Africans in graves marked with the cross. At the hour of death, they prayed Christian prayers.11 African and African-descent people also celebrated the Lord’s Supper in palenques. During the Haitian revolution, the rebel camp of Trou Coffy outside of Léogâne, Haiti, secured a priest and articles for saying the Mass under the direction of their leader, the visionary Romaine-la-Prophétesse. Other rebel encampments also patronized priests or celebrated Mass without one.12
The institutional Church was far more visibly present to enslaved people in the urban spheres of the Americas. Convents and churches where enslaved people were held by individuals or communities dominated the landscape.13 Cities like Lima and Havana were the seedbed of enslaved resistance to slavery from within the Church and other institutions of colonial rule. Ecclesiastical courts heard cases presented by enslaved people over matters of abuse, separation from spouses, and in defense of the rare cases of freedom granted and recognized to infants at the baptismal font.14 Their own litigation, where they drew on precedent legal cases and the legal experiences of their fellow enslaved, established legal rights for the enslaved.15
Enslaved Catholics built their own institutions where the Church had failed them. This thesis was made by the late Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., in his study of Black Catholics in the United States, but it holds true across the Americas.16 Out of the experience of enslavement, abjectness, and racism, African and African-descent Catholics created communities that made the Church into a site of Christian charity. The most significant Afro-Catholic institution was the confraternity (cofradía, hermandad, mayordomía, or irmandade), a lay organization dedicated to a saint or the Blessed Virgin.17 In Africa, Catholic confraternities flourished firstly because these medieval institutions were the way by which the Portuguese missionaries understood and planted Catholicism, and secondly because of a correspondence with African structures of self-governing and cults of the dead. In Portugal and Spain and the Portuguese and Spanish Americas, these institutions also became sites for collective activity against a dehumanizing culture, the destruction of the family and community by slave traffic and enslavement, and individual acts of unspeakable violence. From within confraternities, enslaved people buried their dead, nursed the infirm, fed the destitute, and practiced other works of mercy. Confraternities also provided loans for individual enslaved people’s manumission, and gave Africans a body through which they could represent themselves to cities, ecclesiastical authorities, the crowns and their agents. The festive culture that was another part of the charism and holy work of confraternities permitted Africans and African-descent people to elect their own kings and queens and to stage African and Afro-Atlantic performances, music, and dance. Given that many confraternities were organized by language or ethnic marker, these collective, holy bodies preserved African nations, languages, and traditions while also forging new collective identities and kinship bonds that made enslaved life more bearable.18 The confraternity also contains traces of an African Catholic intellectual community. The confraternity that I study in Santo Domingo, Nuestra Señora del Carmen, attempted to use to their advantage the elite associations enjoyed by another confraternity under the same name/patronage in Caracas.19 Enslaved and free Africans drew on trans-Caribbean and trans-American circuits of knowledge in order to enrich and defend their own devotions.20
An African theology of the people
Very rarely, the clergy collaborated with African Catholics. The edifying ministry of Alonso de Sandoval, S.J., and St. Pedro Claver, S.J., to the newly arrived enslaved in 17th-century Cartagena depended on translations and theological preparation by enslaved and free African catechists, women and men.21 Claver did not wish to abolish slavery; he worked for the salvation of souls and the alleviation of bodily suffering of recently arrived captives. Indeed, as he gave comfort to the terrified, sick, and dying, he explained slavery to them with egregious omissions and recommendations for their docility in the face of enslavement. “The whites brought them here . . . so that they would serve them, and if they did so with diligence, they would receive many gifts and would be clothed very well.”22 However, Claver’s ministry also subverted the racial assumptions that justified slavery and included catechists in this process. In the inquiry after Claver’s death, the enslaved, African-born catechist Ignacio Soso recalled that the tired Claver would sit on a small bench or some empty wineskin and cede the chairs to his catechists “because he would always say that in this ministry the negros interpretes were more important and necessary than he was.”23
The African catechists working with Pedro Claver developed Afro-Catholic-inflected interpretations of the sacrament of baptism. Larissa Brewer-García in her 2020 monograph Beyond Babel notes that the process of catechesis, penance, and baptism developed by Claver and his catechists framed African catechumens as members of a collective mankind for whom Christ died. The African catechists’ testimonies also contained a startling theology of baptism as an act that transformed the “ugly” into the “very beautiful,” that made the soul like the sun in its “splendor and purity.” Their testimonies did not use the image of whiteness, which had been present in the Christian tradition since the second century and which in the 17th century was used by Europeans to describe Black conversion specifically.24
We can elaborate upon Brewer-García’s observations. The theology of baptism of the Cartagena African catechists drew on the Christian tradition for the notion of baptism as a transformation of the body and soul of the Christian. Paul’s explanation of baptism to the Colossians as a sharing in Christ’s burial and resurrection contains imagery of the baptized as a new creation.25 Elsewhere in the epistles, baptism is understood to set apart the body by a mark; it is the “seal for the day of redemption” in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.26 The African idea of baptismal splendor also contained the early Christian understanding of “light,” which in the epistles is Christ, and also the life of His redemption, and also the Christian share in these by baptism.27 “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light,” sang the early Christians in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.28
The Cartagena African catechists must have also been influenced by the liturgies they witnessed, enabled, and assisted. The canons of Trent used the words of Christ to define the sacrament, “born again of water and the Holy Spirit.” The catechist Francisco Yolofo recalled one memorable baptism of a dying man, Juan Mandinga. Yolofo and Claver entered Mandinga’s room under a wave of heat and a “repugnant” smell. After Francisco Yolofo instructed Mandinga in the faith, Claver baptized him. During the rite, Yolofo probably held and opened two small vessels for Claver, the pure oil of catechumens and the spicy oil of chrism. Within minutes or hours of the baptism, Mandinga began to gasp for breath. Yolofo left his bedside to find Claver, and it seems that Mandinga had time to receive the sacrament of extreme unction as well. The air would have cleared again with the clean, sharp smell of oil. The entire household was now present. Although Yolofo did not comment again on the stuffy air, now it held the sacramental meaning that Yolofo had just taught the dying man: Baptism purifies.29 The African Catholic interpretation of the “splendor and purity” of baptism placed the Church’s sacrament within its ancient and recent traditions, but also made it entirely suitable for African Catholics, and thus more fertile.
African Catholic abolitionism
Mendonça’s suit was global not merely in geographic scope but also in theological reasoning. He demanded moral coherence from the Church that had condemned the enslavement of the Indians in the 16th century.
African Catholics also offered the Church a critique of Atlantic slavery rooted in the Catholic tradition and their own horrific experiences of the economic system of slavery. In 1684, a Kongolese prince named Lourenço da Silva Mendonça presented a case before the Propaganda Fide arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and Atlantic slavery. He attacked the illegal and inhuman Portuguese practice of creating slaves and trading in enslaved people, the system of chattel (perpetual and inheritable) slavery, and the global practice of inhuman treatment of enslaved people. Mendonça’s path to the Vatican was the result of collaboration among African-descent Catholics, enslaved and free, from Brazil, Portugal, and Spain, who had commissioned Mendonça to represent their Catholic brotherhoods and submitted their own testimonies of the horrors of slavery. His suit was global not merely in its geographic scope but also in its theological reasoning. Mendonça demanded moral coherence from the Church, which had blessed and justified the Portuguese creation of Atlantic slavery. Just as the papacy had condemned the enslavement of the Indians in the 16th century, so it must now defend the African. All people are equal, “their souls charged with God’s breath,” he explained in his brief.30 Mendonça undergirded his suit with an unspoken charge against the Church. The words morir es lo mas cierto, death is the only certain thing, were written around a hand-drawn seal of the Propaganda Fide on a document Mendonça submitted in his case. Thus Mendonça suggested that Church was responsible for the eternal death of Catholics across the Atlantic world, who were despairing, dying, and committing suicide under enslavement.
In response to Mendonça’s suit, the papacy and the Portuguese Crown issued respective condemnations of Atlantic slavery, which fell on the deaf ears of the Catholics of the Americas.31 Mendonça litigated within a wave of Black abolitionism that was accelerated by the possibility of African self-representation in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas (within the cofradía, the militia, or the palenque) and the expansion of legal and theological literacy within African communities.32 Although the Church did not dismantle slavery in the 17th century, and many Catholic faithful became even more embedded in the institution after this date, the Church archived and preserved anti-slavery Catholic reasoning, not only within its libraries but also in the Catholic life of its members.
Modern African Catholicism
We find here one of the earliest formulations of the principle of human equality by African and African American Catholics. At the Cushwa conference in April, José Casanova in his opening statements proposed to analyze “globalization” in order to avoid the Western-centrism contained in the concept of “modernity.” In fact, the study of the former helps us to revise our definition of the latter. The fruits of African Catholicism—lay associations, charity, at-once-traditional-and-popular theologies, a defense of human dignity—lie at the heart of modern Catholicism as it is understood and lived today. The examples considered here contribute to the scholarly debate that we must re-define modernity as something that emerged on the periphery.33
The Church was globalized by the Christian life of African Catholics. Out of the forced migration of African Catholics and the collision of Church and slavery emerged African Catholic communities that expanded, deepened, and refined the Church. The Christian life of African and African-descent Catholics drew together Africans from across oceans and empires, most notably in the work of Lourenço da Silva Mendonça but also in the holy devotions of countless nameless confraternity members. This Christian life was so abundant that it overflowed onto streets crowded in holy processions. It brought catechumens into baptismal “splendor,” and brought all in the Church into a deeper encounter with the Church’s mysteries. In the words of the gospel of Matthew, it “gave light to all in the house.”34
Maria Cecilia Ulrickson is assistant professor of American Church history at the Catholic University of America. She studies slavery, emancipation, and Black Catholicism in Haiti/the Dominican Republic and the wider Atlantic world. Her working manuscript, “Freed Four Times in Santo Domingo,” examines the four emancipations brought by revolutionary Haiti to the Dominican Republic.
This article appears in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.
Notes
1 Paul and Barnabas defined the church thus when they defended their mission to the Gentiles: “For so the Lord has commanded us, ‘I have made you a light to the Gentiles, that you may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth’” (Acts 13:47). All scripture in this essay comes from the New American Bible.
2 After the keynote, I suggested to Casanova that African Catholics might just be another globalizing group. Casanova noted that my historical subjects did not circulate in Asia. Although I am limiting my discussion to African Catholics in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds because this is my area of knowledge, it would be possible to satisfy Casanova’s geographic definition of Catholic globalization by also considering enslaved and free African Catholics in the Indian Ocean. See Stephanie Hassell, Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal’s Indian Empire, 1500–1700 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2025).
3 This is Nicholas V’s Romanus Pontifex, January 8, 1455, accessed at papalencyclicals.net/nichol05/romanus-pontifex.htm. Herman Bennett argues that the historical canon has misread the papal bull Romanus Pontifex as actual law or as ideological justification for the Portuguese enslavement of Africans. Bennett argues that the Portuguese justified slavery and obtained slaves by way of diplomatic relations with African monarchs. Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
4 The Atlantic slave trade in this region accelerated especially because of Portuguese willingness to take advantage of any internal political disorder in African kingdoms. On the enslavement of Kongolese subjects (many of whom were Catholic) despite the prohibition by Kongolese rulers, see Linda M. Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491–1800,” The Journal of African History 50, no. 1 (2009): 1–22.
5 On the evangelization of Upper Guinea by merchants and missionaries, see Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450–1950 (New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1994); Jeroen Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2022).
6 John K Thornton, Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga, King of Kongo, trans. Luis Madureira (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2023).
7 John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 147–67, jstor.org/stable/181386; John K Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 261–78; John K Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Thornton, Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga.
8 SlaveVoyages, The Slave Voyages Consortium, slavevoyages.org.
9 Reconocimiento de las Haciendas de Santo Domingo, January 8, 1780, ANC, ASD, Leg. 127, No. 3, reproduced in Gerardo Cabrera Prieto, Documentos Para La Historia Colonial de La República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2015), 219–22.
10 José Luis Sáez, La Iglesia y El Negro Esclavo En Santo Domingo. Una Historia de Tres Siglos (Santo Domingo: Patronato de la Ciudad Colonial de Santo Domingo, 1994), 49–50.
11 This information was recorded in statements taken after capture, and both speakers emphasized their own Catholicism as an act of self-preservation, but these Catholic acts probably did happen. Declaración de Francisco Angola, sesenta años, antiguo residente del Palenque, nacido en África, January 18, 1634, and Declaración de Juan de la Mar, negro criollo, residente de dos años y según algunos residentes, líder dentro del Palenque, February, 13 1634, transcribed in “Elder, Slave, and Soldier: Maroon Voices from the Palenque del Limón,” ed. Kathryn Joy McKnight from Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo, eds., Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (New York: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009), 64–81. See also Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians, 92–95.
12 Terry Rey, The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 5.
13 On slave-owning by convents and monasteries in Santo Domingo and Lima respectively, see Sáez, La Iglesia y El Negro Esclavo En Santo Domingo.
14 Enslaved people also petitioned for protection in municipal and royal courts. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Alexander L. Wisnoski, “It Is Unjust for the Law of Marriage to Be Broken by the Law of Slavery: Married Slaves and Their Masters in Early Colonial Lima,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014): 234–52; Frank Trey Proctor, “An ‘Imponderable Servitude’: Slave versus Master Litigation for Cruelty (Maltratamiento or Sevicia) in Late Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 3 (2015): 662–84; Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For examples of the failure of Catholic owners to respect the right of enslaved people to marry freely, see “A Jesuit Friar Writes on Slave Marriages and Immoral Acts Forced by Masters upon Their Slaves,” 1700, cited in Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil, 3rd ed. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 174–78.
15 Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 659–92; Karen B Graubart, “Pesa Más La Libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and the History of Afro-Latin American Ideas,” The William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2021): 427–58.
16 Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., “Black Catholics in Nineteenth Century America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, no. 1 (1986): 1–17; Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., A History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1990).
17 Traces of these confraternities were also preserved in other forms in the French Caribbean and Dutch Americas, and even in the English-speaking U.S. Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians; Jeroen Dewulf, “Why Rara Burns Judas during Lent: Rethinking the Origins of Catholic Elements in Haitian Culture from an Afro-Iberian Perspective,” The Americas 80, no. 1 (2023): 33–68.
18 Elizabeth Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2005); Nicole van Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Karen B. Graubart, “‘So Color de Una Cofradía’: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012): 43–64; Miguel A. Valerio, “Architects of Their Own Humanity: Race, Devotion, and Artistic Agency in Afro-Brazilian Confraternal Churches in Eighteenth-Century Salvador and Ouro Preto,” Colonial Latin American Review 30, no. 2 (2021): 238–71; Karen B. Graubart, Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); Miguel Valerio, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
19 Sentencia del dho Sr Juez Metropolitano, Frai Fernando obispo de Pto Rico, January 28, 1722, Archivo General de Indias, Gobierno, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, Leg. 296 (Cartas y expedientes de personas seculares, 1726–1736).
20 “The Sacred Heart of Haiti: Lay Devotion and the National Church in Early Haiti,” Catholic Historical Review (Fall 2020); Jeroen Dewulf, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 96.
21 See the testimonies prepared for the beatification process of Pedro Claver, S.J., On women’s interpretation work, see Larissa Brewer-García, “Gender and the Work of Missionary Translation: Black Women Interpreters among the Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21, no. 4 (2021).
22 Testigo Ignacio de nación angola, en el proceso folio 515 reproduced in Anna María Splendiani and Tulio Aristizábal, S.J., eds., Proceso de Beatificación y Canonización de San Pedro Claver, Edición de 1696 (Bogotá: Centro Editoria Javierano, CEJA, 2002), 219.
23 Testigo Ignacio Soso, en el proceso, folio 465, reproduced in Splendiani and Aristizábal, S.J., 212.
24 Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 172–87. Also relevant here is Erin Rowe’s fascinating study of the early modern hagiographies of Benedict of Palermo, Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, and Martin de Porres. These texts used the Spanish-language adjective candida (of the Latin word candidus, meaning brightness, but often translated as whiteness) to describe the at-once physical and spiritual transformation of saints of color into visible signs of the grace that inhabited them. These hagiographies created an archetype of Black holy saints grounded within the Christian tradition of the inseparability of body and soul. While their Black bodies did not reflect any interior mark of sin, their holiness was produced through their earthly suffering of mistreatment, which they endured because of slave status and skin color. Erin Rowe, “After Death, Her Face Turned White: Blackness, Whiteness, and Sanctity in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 3 (June 2016).
29 Trent Seventh Session, “On Baptism,” Canon 3, papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/seventh-session.htm; Testigo Francisco Yolofo, en el proceso, folio 697, reproduced in Splendiani and Aristizábal, S.J., 310.
30 ‘Alla quale col suo fiato infuse Dio l’anima,’ from APF, SOCG, 490, fl. 140r, cited in José Lingna Nafafé, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 371.
31 Mendonça’s court case is the subject of a recent monograph by José Lingna Nafafé (2022), from which I draw many of these details. Before Nafafé’s book, Mendonça was also known to historians through an article written in the early days of African Church history by Richard Gray. Richard Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade : Lourenço da Silva, the Capuchins and the Decisions of the Holy Office,” Past & Present 115, no. 115 (1987): 52–68; Lingna Nafafé, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça.
32 See the remarkable petition to the Spanish Crown for the abolition of pardo and cuarterón slaves made by four petitioners in the viceroyalty of Peru in 1681. Graubart, “Pesa Más La Libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and the History of Afro-Latin American Ideas.” See also Fernando Rodrigues Montes D’Oca, “Two Capuchin Friars in Defense of African Slaves’ Liberty: Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans,” Patristica et Mediaevalia XXXVI (2015).
33 The principles of anti-colonialism and abolitionism that animated the Haitian revolution are great examples of modern principles that emerged out of African sensibilities, experiences of enslavement, and political experimentation. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” The Atlantic World 31, no. 1 (2014): 227–42; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader, Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi L. Fernando, eds. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2021), 142–159.
34 “Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.” Matthew 5: 15–16.