Sister Thea Bowman was a Black Catholic religious sister, teacher, preacher, singer, evangelist, and social justice advocate.
1937 - On December 29, 1937, she was born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman, to Mary Esther Bowman, a teacher, and Theon Edward Bowman, a physician, in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She later described herself as an "old folks' child," because her parents were middle-aged when she was born. She was their only child.
1947 - Her parents were Methodists, but Bertha attended a Catholic school, the Holy Child Jesus School in Canton, Mississippi, which had been founded for Black children by the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, a religious order from La Crosse, Wisconsin. At the age of nine, with her parents' permission, she converted to Catholicism and was baptized into the Catholic Church.
1953 - At the age of fifteen, she decided to become a religious sister, and despite her parents' initial concerns regarding how she would be received by other members of the convent, she became the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
1955 - She was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was treated for nearly a year at River Pines Sanatorium, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
1956 - She took the name Sister Mary Thea, in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her father, Theon. The name Thea also meant "of God."
1958 - She taught at Blessed Sacrament School, in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
1961 - She taught at Holy Child Jesus School, in Canton, Mississippi. She directed the school choir, and they recorded an album to raise money to build a new wing at the school.1
1965 - She earned a B.A. in English from Viterbo College (now Viterbo University), a Catholic college in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
1968 - She became s founding member of the National Black Sisters' Conference (NBSC), an organization of Black Catholic sisters and nuns.
1969 - She earned an M.A. in English at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. As a graduate student, she created the first course in Black literature taught at the university.
1972 - She earned a Ph.D. in English at The Catholic University of America. Her doctoral dissertation was on the relationship of pathos and style in Thomas More's A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. She traveled in Europe and studied during the summer at Oxford University.
1972 - She started teaching at Viterbo College, eventually becoming chair of the English department.
1978 - She became a consultant (and later the director) of the Office of Intercultural Awareness for the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi.2 She had speaking engagements across the country, and she became a nationally recognized advocate for social justice.
Following the modernizing changes made by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and because her order, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, allowed members to forgo the traditional requirement of wearing a nun's habit, she started wearing African dress in order to celebrate her ancestry and more closely reflect the people whom she served.3
She advocated for the full inclusion of African American religious expression within the Catholic Church, and she urged the Church to combat racism.
1980 - She was a founding faculty member of the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.
1984 - Both of her parents died, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which had already spread to her lymph nodes and bones. She underwent surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
1985 - She received The Harriet Tubman Award from the National Black Sisters' Conference. She traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to participate in the International Eucharistic Congress, and she also traveled to Zimbabwe and Nigeria.4
1987 - She was interviewed by Mike Wallace for a segment of 60 Minutes, which was broadcast on May 3rd. After seeing the 60 Minutes program, Harry Belafonte began to make plans for a film about her life, starring Whoopi Goldberg. She met both of them during a trip to California in 1988. Harry Belafonte also visited her home in Canton, Mississippi, and he visited her at Xavier University in New Orleans, where he spoke with her students.
At the Conference of The National Congress of the Religious Formation, in New Orleans, she delivered an address entitled "Cosmic Spirituality: Formation in a New Age," in which she said,
She was an inspirational figure in the creation of the first African American Catholic hymnal, which was published in 1987 and was entitled "Lead Me, Guide Me.""We invite men and women from the cultures of the world to come into our congregations...So often in formation and in community, their spiritual gifts and spiritual journeys are ignored. Talk with the people of color in your congregations, in your formation programs. Ask them to what extent they believe that you are serious about understanding them--their history, their experience, their culture, their heritage, their art, their music, their styles of prayer, their styles of meeting, their songs, their dances, their modalities of relationship. To what extent are you serious about sharing their spirituality, their styles of life and prayer and relationship?...When Jesus is among us, to work among us miracles of transformation and miracles of love, there is no neutral ground. Neutral ground becomes loving ground, loving ground becomes holy ground, holy ground becomes Kingdom ground. We are the children of the cosmos, the children of the universe."5
1988 - She recorded the albums "Songs of My People" and "Round the Glory Manger."
Among the honorary degrees she received were doctoral degrees from Clarke College, Xavier University, Sacred Heart University, Viterbo College, Marygrove College, and Georgetown University. She was the first African-American woman to receive an honorary doctorate in religion from Boston College.
She began by singing, in her beautiful, operatic voice, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child," and she finished by having all the bishops stand, and join arms and sing "We Shall Overcome." In a very moving and charismatic speech, she addressed the question of "What does it mean to be Black and Catholic?" She explained that Black people are sometimes viewed by the Church with a patronizing and paternalistic attitude, and that some Catholics (and even some Black Catholics) may not fully approve of Black religious expression within the Catholic liturgy. Some members of the Church may feel that Black religious expression is not properly Catholic, and that it's not appropriately solemn or dignified. But she also explained that being Black and Catholic means that
"I bring myself, my Black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become, I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African American song and dance, and gesture and movement, and teaching and preaching, and healing and responsibility as gifts to the Church."6
Thus, she called for the Church to be a place in which the gifts of all people are welcome.7
She called for the Church to enable all Catholics to worship and pray, to feed the hungry and clothe the poor, to shelter the homeless and comfort the sick, to teach, and to do the work of the Church in the modern world.
1990 - Just a few weeks before she died, as she reflected on the meaning of Holy Week, she wrote, "Old folks used to say, "God is bread when you'e hungry. God is water when you're thirsty. God is a shelter from the storm. God is rest when you're weary. God's my doctor. God's my lawyer. God's my captain who never lost a battle. God is my lily of the valley."8
On March 30th, she died of breast cancer, at the age of 52, in Canton, Mississippi. On April 4th, she was buried next to her parents at Elmwood Cemetery, in Memphis, Tennessee.
She was posthumously awarded the Laetare Medal, the oldest and most prestigious award given to American Catholics, from Notre Dame University. She was the first African-American to receive this award.
An obituary in the NY Times on April 1st began by saying,
"Sister Thea Bowman, a nationally active black educator who with song, prayer and persistent exhortation urged the Roman Catholic Church to embrace the culture of African Americans, died of cancer on Friday at her home in Canton, Miss. She was 52 years old."9
2018 - She was endorsed for sainthood by the U.S. Catholic Bishops at their fall Plenary Assembly in Baltimore.
FOOTNOTES
1"Going Home Like a Shooting Star: Thea Bowman's Journey to Sainthood," film documentary, New Group Media and the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi, written and produced by Sister Judith Ann Zielinski, 2022.
2Sister Thea Bowman, Shooting Star: Selected Writings and Speeches, edited by Celestine Cepress (Winona Minnesota: Saint Mary's Press, 1993), p. 14.
3René Ostberg, "Thea Bowman," in Encyclopedia Brittanica, 26 March 2026, online at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thea-Bowman.
4Sister Thea Bowman, Shooting Star: Selected Writings and Speeches, edited by Celestine Cepress, p. 13.
5Ibid., pp. 106-107.
6Ibid., p. 32.
7Ibid. p. 29.
8Thea Bowman, In My Own Words, compiled and edited by Maurice J. Nutt (Liguori, Missouri: Liguori Publications, 2009), p. 3.
9Dennis Hevesi, "Sister Thea Bowman, 52, Worker for Catholic Sharing With Blacks," in The New York Times, April 1, 1990.
