Synodal Failures Amid White Supremacy: Lessons from the U.S. Church's History of Synods

Photo by Warren K. Leffler in (Library of Congress) via Unsplash

CONFERENCE: Catholic Theological Society of America

PANEL: Historical Theology II Topic Session

TIME: June 12, 2:45-4:30 p.m. (CST)

WHERE: Mills 7, Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch (St. Louis, MO)

Abstract

Mark your calendar and conference program for this upcoming paper. In the meantime, you can connect with the author on socials and view the paper précis below.

As synodal reform unfolds, some ecclesiologists have advanced Pope Francis’ call for “a sound ‘decentralization’” through the principle of ecclesial subsidiarity. Problematically, this approach ignores the U.S. church’s historical inability to attend to the sensus fidei of the periphery especially in the context of white supremacy. Mining the U.S. church’s history of national and local synods, I demonstrate the limitations of ecclesial subsidiarity in the context of white supremacy. Instead, I propose synodal reform proceed along two complementary paths – ongoing decentralization and synodal centralization – that would hold synodal bodies accountable to the sensus fidei of the periphery amid white supremacy.

INTRODUCTION

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NATIONAL SYNODALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF WHITE SUPREMACY:

Second Plenary Council of Baltimore (1866)

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LOCAL SYNODALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF WHITE SUPREMACY:

Augustus Tolton & the Synod of Alton (Springfield, IL)

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SYNODAL PROCESS IN THE CONTEXT OF WHITE SUPREMACY

The U.S. Bishops and their Pastoral Letter on Racism

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PRIMACY IN THE CONTEXT OF WHITE SUPREMACY

The Insufficiency of Ecclesial Subsidiarity

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(I am a poor artist…)

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Synodal Centralization and Synodal Primacy

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Appendix: definition of terms

Let’s Connect!

Catholicity Amid white Normativity: How Inculturating ‘white American Culture’ Fosters Ecclesial Diversity

Photo by Gregory Hales on Unsplash

In this scholarly (peer-reviewed) book chapter, I contribute to an edited volume that engages embodying ecclesial diversity. My contribution to this discourse around catholicity - as unity in diversity - tackles inculturation in the highly racialized context of the U.S. Beginning with deeply personal and parental questions about how to help my children appreciate the white American culture of their mother that differs from my Tamil American culture, I propose a distinction between racial whiteness and white American culture offering a path for inculturating the latter and purifying it of the sinfulness of the former.

Stay tuned for the publication of this volume (the version of record) cited below and check back here to access the author’s preprint version of this manuscript. In the meantime, check out the paper’s précis below.

Version of Record for Research & Citation

“Catholicity Amid white Normativity: How Inculturating white American Culture Fosters Ecclesial Diversity.” In Embodying Ecclesial Diversity, edited by Cristina Lledo Gomez and Brian Flanagan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, McMillan. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. (Forthcoming 2026)

Paper Précis

When I visit my wife’s white American family, I glimpse grace in moments of fellowship, laughter, and joy as they gather with foods, practices, and modes of relationality that differ from my own Tamil American culture. Formed by her culture, my wife is an extraordinary partner to me and an exemplary mother to our three children. As we raise our children who share in both of our cultural identities, we struggle to help them appreciate the positive forms and values of these cultural identities; the challenges of our domestic church point to the broader challenges of inculturation and catholicity faced by the U.S. church where 64% of Filipino Americans, 54% of Latino Americans, 27% of Vietnamese Americans, and 21% of white Americans are Catholic. Given this multicultural reality and Pope Francis’ teaching on inculturation, catholicity as unity in diversity in the U.S. requires nurturing culturally distinct and vibrantly inculturated forms of American Catholicism.

Problematically, white supremacy and racism are structures of sin embedded within the culture of white Americans; consequently, their culture functions normatively and invisibly to suppress American catholicity. Indeed, the culture of white Americans is an unquestioned and invisible norm which evaluates of other cultural perspectives but is rarely itself evaluated. In this sense, their culture sets the terms within which other cultural forms of Church can flourish. In its most harmful form, the culture of white Americans not only promotes white supremacy and white Christian nationalism but also prevents parents like me who have personally suffered the trauma of racism from effectively purging racism from the culture that our white partners pass on to our children. At the same time, the normativity that insulates this culture from evaluation also prevents white people themselves from understanding their own cultural identity and advancing its inculturation. Indeed, most white Catholics no longer identify themselves culturally according to their distant European-immigrant roots but also cannot fully articulate their own cultural identity. As long as the culture of white Americans occludes its own cultural subjectivity and remains normative, this culture reinforces the supremacy of whiteness, constrains other cultural forms of U.S. Catholicism, and ultimately inhibits the catholicity of the American church.

Mindful of these personal, parental, and ecclesial realities, I argue that the inculturation of what i call ‘white American culture’ remains a necessary and outstanding task. I contend that inculturating ‘white American culture’ requires following the model of inculturation found in the history and living example of Black Catholicism. To this end, I tease out the distinction between racial whiteness and ‘white American culture.’ Next, I draw on teología del pueblo, which has had an outsized impact on magisterial teaching concerning inculturation, to distill the primary fruits of inculturation and show that ‘white American culture’ has not yet been inculturated. Finally, I demonstrate the aptness of Black American Catholicism as a paradigm of inculturation for ‘white American culture’ and propose some practical steps parishes can take to catalyze the inculturation of this culture.

Ultimately, by inculturating ‘white American culture,’ the U.S. church can transform ‘white American culture’ from an invisible norm to a contextual perspective alongside other American cultures in a diverse U.S. church and help untangle spiritually diseased connection of ‘white American culture’ to racial caste and white supremacy.