New Book Describes How Systemic Racism Shapes Catholic Life
Dr. Gerardo Marti – September 02, 2025 [Reposted with permission from Gerardo Marti’s Substack, “American Blindspot“]
Tia Noelle Pratt’s new book Black and Catholic: Racism, Identity, and Religion is a careful and clarifying intervention into the study of race and religion in the United States. Smoothly written, it moves without strain between scholarly critique and personal experience.
Resisting sentimentality, this examination of the African American experience in the Roman Catholic Church insists that religious identity is not simply about conviction or affiliation—it is also a social location shaped by memory, geography, demographics, and power.
At its core, Dr. Pratt, a practicing Catholic herself, examines the lived experience of Black Catholics and the barriers—symbolic, structural, and theological—that shape how they are seen and not seen in the U.S. Catholic Church. The central tension she names is between the ideal of Catholic universality and the reality of exclusion. While religious universality is powerful in theory, it often works to obscure the ways that the Church’s liturgy, spaces, and bureaucracies fail to accommodate the Black experience.
Pratt is a sociologist and Assistant Vice President of Mission Engagement & Strategic Initiatives at Villanova University. Her book comes after years of investment, bringing together experience and research to produce a distinctive contribution. What makes the book especially compelling is its shift in focus from heroic individual actors to the systemic barriers themselves, how they are produced, maintained, and justified. Drawing on an array of influential scholars of race, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Joe Feagin, Michael Emerson, and Elijah Anderson, Pratt offers a sociologically informed account of racialized religious life that centers the institutionalized nature of exclusion.
One of the book’s contributions is its sustained attention to the everyday forms of exclusion that register not only in doctrine, but in tone, gesture, spatial arrangement, and social interaction. She integrates personal narratives to help us understand.
In one especially vivid story, Pratt recounts arriving at Mass after being invited by close friends to witness an infant baptism—only to be confronted on where she had sat down. The pew was reserved for families with children being baptized, and a lay woman, convinced she was exerting her proper authority to monitor who sat there, insisted Pratt leave—admonishing her as if she would obviously understand her violation. In her telling, even as she entered the sanctuary, she writes: “It was clear that some believed I did not belong there.” The moment of stern rebuke—mundane, almost routine—captures how Black Catholics are treated as outsiders in spaces that claim universality. It represents a form of racial trauma that is quiet, cumulative, and too often left unnamed.
Pratt recounts arriving at Mass only to be chased from a pew reserved for families with children being baptized. “It was clear,” she writes, “that some believed I did not belong there.” That moment—mundane, almost routine—captures how Black Catholics are treated as outsiders in spaces that claim universality.
Pratt presses the analysis of racial exclusion outward using interview and archival materals to the material and structural. Transportation, housing, and mobility become barriers to participation in Catholic life, revealing how inequality is literally built into the geography of church locations. Church closings only accentuate issues of access, particularly if the parish had dominantly served Black people. These are among the barriers hindering Black Catholic participation.
Welcoming someone at the door of a parish means little if the very placement of that parish already encodes exclusion.
Her analysis also explores practices of liturgy and worship. In my own research on worship and liturgy in Worship Across the Racial Divide, I was struck by the idea of enculturation—that all worship is culturally shaped, even if only some forms are explicitly labeled as such. As Pratt describes in this book, what is called Black Catholic worship is treated as contextual and particular, while what is simply called Catholic worship is presented as neutral and universal. Pratt exposes how whiteness operates through defaults: marginalizing Black expressions while elevating white-coded practices as the standard.
This comes through powerfully in her discussion of the types of music found in Catholic Mass. Pratt documents the wide range of musical practices that shape Black Catholic life—gospel, spirituals, call-and-response hymns, and “off-book” improvisations that are known and sung. Such practices are not just aesthetic flourishes; they are theological expressions carrying meanings about God, community, history, and survival. Yet these musical practices are often taken on with ambivalence by other members and church leaders—or outright resistance. Worship, then, becomes a site of both religious expression and cultural constraint, where belonging, identity, and power are constantly negotiated.
Worship, then, becomes a site of both expression and constraint, where belonging, identity, and power are constantly negotiated.
Pratt makes clear that discussions about liturgy and music are not simply cultural debates but theological ones. If the Catholic Church insists on universality, then it must confront the question: Who is the Church for? Indeed, this is a question that every church must continually ask itself. Who gets to define reverence? Whose bodies and voices set the norm? What forms of devotion are embraced as faithful? And which are dismissed as “too emotional” or “too different”?
Pratt’s line of inquiry leads to some of the book’s most searching reflections on identity and inheritance. What does it mean to be Black and Catholic when your presence is slow to be recognized by the institution meant to sustain you? What does it mean to hand on a faith that has not always made room for your community’s story? Pratt rightly suggests that sustaining Black Catholic identity requires more than personal resilience among Black people—it demands structural support, institutional accountability, and a fundamental reimagining of universality itself.
One question I have asked Dr. Pratt directly concerns authenticity. At one point, Pratt writes that “No one liturgical style is more authentically Black or truly Catholic than another” (p. 54). Yet earlier in the same chapter, she asserts that “incorporating Blackness into Mass is essential” (p. 51). Much of the book gestures toward distinguishing authentically Black worship from worship that resists or obscures Black practice. My question to Pratt is whether she sees particular forms of worship as necessary for Catholic leadership to recognize what “incorporating Blackness” might mean in practice—or whether her claim is more about resisting narrow definitions altogether. In response, she believes efforts must be made to actively incorporate Black people in Mass—especially if they are already there.
Pratt’s book is both a diagnosis and an invitation: to imagine a Church where Black Catholic identity is not tolerated, but essential.
In the end, Black and Catholic is both a diagnosis and an invitation. There’s much more in the book that uncovers what is broken, but it also holds open the possibility of something different. Pratt does not offer an idealized past to recover but a future to imagine: a Church where Black Catholic worship, identity, and experience are not tolerated or accommodated, but received as essential, generative, and central to the meaning of the faith itself.
That vision may not readily reopen closed parishes, a rich discussion in itself that she pursues with depth. But perhaps Pratt’s reflective analysis can open other doors, not only in her native Philadelphia, but also across the nation, and even across the global Church.
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On Being Black and Catholic in America – by Gerardo Martí
Gerardo Martí | Davidson College
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