Thea Bowman

Her father begged her not to go. "They're not going to like you," Dr. Theon Bowman told his fifteen-year-old daughter Bertha. But she'd already made up her mind…"I'm going to make them love me." "Everybody wanted to be near Thea Bowman." Her joy was contagious. She was tough, too. "I learned survival," she told an interviewer. "I'm from Mississippi." The granddaughter of slaves, she grew up in the Jim Crow South, where segregation was "an invulnerable tradition." But she learned important lessons at home. Her father, a doctor, was "really dedicated to trying to help people, and I grew up with that example." From her mother, a teacher, she learned to rise above hatred. "Returning insults," she learned, "only makes you small like they are."

She went by herself to the local parish, where she discovered that Catholics were as racist as everybody else. Sitting in an upper pew, she recalled, a kindly old lady suggested she move back. The lady herself wouldn't mind, she said, "but the others might not like it, and after all, they had been nice enough to buy a whole black pew just for the colored folks who came to their church to greet the Lord." Still Thea was undeterred. In fact, she decided to join the Sisters.

“My people have been a loving people, and I'm proud of that. We've been a people of song and story. We survived oppression, and we're still trying to survive, and still trying to keep on keeping on. I like being Black. I have friends who are white and brown and yellow and red, and all the colors in between. And I love my friends. I love to be with them. I love to share with them. But I l like being myself, and I thank God for making me my Black self.”

Thea believed that when people rediscovered their own heritage, it enabled them to better appreciate other traditions…In a 1980s interview she said: "I can introduce my Black friends to my Hispanic friends, to my Asian friends, to my Anglo friends. I can be the bridge over troubled water." As musician, author, and speaker, she took a leading role in the Black Catholic community. She had the special gift of being able to meet people on their own terms. Perhaps the climax of her career came in 1989, when she addressed the American Bishops from her wheelchair. Beginning with a song, she challenged her "brother bishops" to live up to their own words and lead others to rediscover what it means to be "truly Catholic."

On a Friday morning, March 30, 1990, Sister Thea Bowman died peacefully in her childhood home. Viterbo College in La Crosse, where she taught, rang its bells fifty-two times for each year of her life.

“I think the difference between me and some people is that I'm content to do my little bit. Sometimes people think they have to do big things in order to make change. But if each one would light a candle we'd have a tremendous light.”

Sister Thea Bowman is currently being considered for official sainthood.