This story by Dawn Araujo-Hawkins first appeared on Global Sisters Report, as part of a series examining how sisters and others are working to heal cities divided after incidents of anti-black racism. You can read the original story here.
These days, Sister Cathy Doherty, SSND devotes most of her energy to promoting interracial friendships between students in the St. Louis-area parochial schools. It's not what she ever imagined she'd be doing, but, as Proverbs says, God's purpose tends to prevail over our best-laid plans.
Nearly every surface of Sister Cathy's office is covered by an image, candle or figurine depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe, the namesake of the parish in Ferguson, Missouri, where she has served as pastoral associate for nearly three decades. Sitting at a conference table — one of the few uncovered spaces in the room — she explains how the events of August 9, 2014, upended everything she thought she understood about what God had called her to.
"My life totally changed when Michael Brown died," she said.
Before "the Ferguson incident," as she calls it, Sister Cathy's whole world had been liturgy: Her master's degree is in liturgy, she had been the chair of the St. Louis liturgical commission and she was in charge of the St. Louis Archdiocese's annual Liturgy Camp for high school students.
But after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, fatally shot Brown, a black 18-year-old, just three miles from Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, and then faced no charges for it, Sister Cathy said focusing on ritual at the expense of racial injustice seemed inappropriate. "How do you live around that eucharistic table with everyone if you don't preach it?"
Today, Sister Cathy's goal is to head off in students the kind of personal-level racism that many attribute to Wilson: the kind that causes a 28-year-old white man to look at an unarmed black teenager and see, instead of a human being, a "demon" that can only be stopped with 12 rounds of ammunition.
Sister Cathy's hallmark program is made up of second-, fourth- and seventh-graders from three schools: the mostly black and Hispanic Our Lady of Guadalupe and the mostly white Incarnate Word and St. Cletus. The first year of the program, students visited each other's schools to learn Catholic social teaching. The second year, Doherty zeroed in on the idea of culture by having students make family trees and research Marian apparitions from around the world.
"If we start when they're little, hopefully, when they're adults, they won't have racism," Sister Cathy said with a thin smile.
In the four years since Brown's death, dismantling racism — at both the personal and systemic levels — has become an integral part of the St. Louis Archdiocese's official mission. Eleven days after Brown was shot, Archbishop Robert Carlson announced he was reviving the 1963 Human Rights Commission (renamed the Peace and Justice Commission) in an effort to better facilitate the Catholic response to the public grief and outrage.
Three women religious, Sister Cathy among them, were named to the 27-member commission, but its director, Marie Kenyon, said to truly understand how local sisters have been galvanized against racism in the last few years, you have to look at the way they've transformed their existing ministries.
For example, Kenyon said, a sister artist opened an art gallery featuring a painting of a black Christ; a sister educator spearheaded a diversity and inclusion training for the principals of all the parochial schools; and a sister community organizer set up interracial, interfaith conversations on race in nearby St. Charles County. Kenyon said she could go on and on.
For her part, Sister Cathy said she believes the movement toward justice will prevail because it has heavenly protection. She's seen the signs.
Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish was scheduled to have its annual Hispanic Fest eight days after the shooting, she said. They didn't want to cancel the event because they wanted to show the community they were not afraid to be out on the streets. "Even if we lost money, we said, 'We have to have it,' " Sister Cathy said.
She convinced Auxiliary Bishop Edward Rice to clear his schedule so he could celebrate the opening Mass as a sign of solidarity, and after Mass the two of them took a pilgrimage to the spot where Brown died.
Sister Cathy said there was a crowd of about 300 people already gathered there, most of them holding roses — a sign of peace, but also the sign of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then, when they made it up to the front, a collection of Our Lady of Guadalupe candles sat alongside where Brown's body had lain in the middle of the street for four hours.
She said Rice asked her if she was afraid of the crowd. "Not anymore," she replied. "Guadalupe is with us. She's not going to let anything happen to anybody today."
