Sr. Thea Bowman, FSPA

A Voice of Joy and Justice

Bertha Elizabeth Bowman was born on December 29, 1937, in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the granddaughter of slaves. Raised in a devout Protestant household, young Bertha was captivated by the Franciscan missionaries who ran the local Catholic school. Their joy, their learning, and their kindness to Black children in the segregated South drew her irresistibly. At age nine she asked to be baptized Catholic, and at fifteen she left Mississippi for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, becoming the community’s only Black member. She took the name Thea, meaning “of God.”

Sr. Thea earned a doctorate in English from the Catholic University of America and taught at every level from elementary school to university. But it was as a preacher, singer, and evangelist that she set the Church on fire. She traveled the country calling Catholics to embrace the gifts of Black spirituality: the music, the storytelling, the communal prayer that African Americans had carried through slavery and segregation. She insisted that Black culture was not something to tolerate but something the whole Church needed to flourish.

In 1984, Sr. Thea was diagnosed with breast cancer. She refused to stop. From a wheelchair, she continued to preach, teach, and sing across the nation. Her most famous moment came in June 1989, when she addressed the full body of U.S. Catholic bishops, challenging them to recognize Black Catholics not as a problem but as a gift. She closed by leading the bishops in singing “We Shall Overcome,” hands joined. She died on March 30, 1990, in Canton, Mississippi, at age 52. In 2018, the Diocese of Jackson opened her cause for canonization.

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