Afro-Atlantic Catholics

In his pioneering book Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1978), Albert J. Raboteau observes in a footnote that “a case could be made, of course, that in hemispheric perspective the majority of Afro-Americans are Catholics” (380, footnote 123). Over forty years later, Jeroen Dewulf makes good on this claim in his John Gilmary Shea Prize-winning work Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians. Shifting Black Christian studies away from the dominant paradigm centered on a syncretism of Protestantism and Indigenous African religions, Dewulf boldly puts forth the argument that a colonial Lusitanian-influenced African Catholicism was a greater influence than Protestantism in Black Christianity, especially in North America (1-3, 9-11). He traces this influence through analyses of lived popular or folk Catholicism using a mixture of textual, anthropological, and linguistic methods. Dewulf gives particular attention to how Catholic brotherhoods and confraternities in areas of Africa—such as the Kingdom of Congo and present-day Cabo Verde; São Tomé and Príncipe; Gambia; Sierra Leone; and Liberia—translated into an American New World context, showing clear and impactful transatlantic continuity within Black Christianity (vii, 35-39). Significantly, these social formations played roles in shaping African American Christianity more generally, not just Catholicism.

Dewulf performs a careful study of the origins of Lusitanian African Catholic brotherhoods and confraternities, starting in the first chapter with the prevalence of such organizations in late medieval and early modern pre-Tridentine Catholicism in Portugal. After noting how they emerged because of increasing urbanization, he discusses these religious networks’ structures, calendars of festivities, and devotional practices, among other aspects. One striking example is his discussion of the bodos aos pobres (banquet for the poor), an event that laid the foundations for the mutual aid societies that would eventually emerge among Afro-Atlantic Catholicism in the Americas (6-25). Dewulf also shows that Africans in Iberian Portugal proper already began forming their own confraternities even before the emergence of thorough Portuguese colonialism and economic trade in Africa (25-34). Furthermore, he demonstrates how the bulk of the Catholicization of Portugal’s African possessions and spheres of influence occurred before the Council of Trent and its reforms that obliterated such confraternities and brotherhoods (15-18). By doing this, Dewulf proves that the conditions that were necessary for African Lusitanian Catholicism to form, especially its brotherhoods and confraternities, were already present in Portugal during the start of colonialism, thus bringing this version of Catholicism to Africa. Such a usage of religious historical context and exchange between the Lusitanian metropole and its African colonies firmly grounds Dewulf’s argument in colonial and early republican transatlantic religio-historical events.

Over the remaining four chapters, Dewulf deftly utilizes primary sources to analyze how an indigenous Lusitanian-African Catholicism, developed during the 15^thfifteenth and 16^th centuries, as many enslaved Africans brought Catholicism with them to the Americas (9, 39). Beginning in the second chapter, he takes a region-by-region approach, studying this syncretized Lusitanian-African Catholicism in Portuguese Cabo Verde, Upper and Lower Guinea, the São Tomé archipelago, Kongo, and Angola (3539). He spends much of his time on Kongo, using colonial and native primary source accounts to show a rich indigenous syncretized Kongolese Lusitanian-African Catholicism, which contained places for Catholic spiritual organizations, such as Kongo’s six confraternities with their own indigenous rituals by the 16^th century’s end, which permeated the kingdom’s upper- and lower-classes (9, 71-74). His important contribution here is to demonstrate that early modern colonial Kongolese Catholicism, although the Portuguese greatly influenced it, included both upper -and lower-class adherents who practiced together with native forms of religious practice and spiritual expression.  

Dewulf then shifts his analysis to the Americas. He employs a similar region-by-region approach to show how this now Afro-American Lusitanian Catholicism developed across the areas of the Americas where enslaved people lived (89-95). These discussions serve as pertinent historical context to describe how Afro-American Lusitanian Catholicism and its practices shaped African American religion, from the colonial period to well into the 20^th century. Dewulf incorporates a rich array of sources, from colonial court documents from New York, 19^th-century texts on Black evangelical churches, and accounts of Black mutual aid societies and their festivities recorded by the musician Louis Armstrong in the 20^th century, among others (161-175). He clearly demonstrates with these sources the legacy of an indigenous folk Lusitanian-influenced African Catholicism shaping African American Christianity and spirituality. When reading Afro-Atlantic Catholics, with all the historical evidence Dewulf shows in his refined prose, I find myself agreeing with him and see its importance within the study of Black Christianity.

Dewulf both draws on existing scholarship and moves the conversation forward. He credits two classic works, John Gillard’s The Catholic Church and the American Negro (St. Joseph Society’s Press, 1928) and Cyprian Davis’ The History of Black Catholics in the United States (Crossroad, 1990), as fundamental in influencing not only his book but also in reconfiguring the study of African American religion (10-11). These books shed light on the overlooked subject of Black Catholics, as Gillard analyzed communal social support networks’ significances among Black Christians and Davis more specifically explored the importance of Black confraternities. With Gillard and Davis, Dewulf locates himself in part of a longer movement to study Black Catholicism that augments the mass of historical scholarship that has overemphasize Protestantism’s role within the study of African American religion.

Afro-Atlantic Catholics is its own pioneering work, timely and essential. Dewulf’s book is paradigm shifting, eschewing the outmoded Protestant bias in Black Christian studies and being the first of its kind to intimately connect, in a transatlantic manner, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, emphasizing the importance of Africans’ Catholicism and agency in the development of their religious traditions. I recommend this book to any historian interested in Black Catholicism and Christianity, early modern colonial Africa and Portugal, and the transatlantic world. 

Philip Chivily is a graduate student in religion at Florida State University.

Philip Chivily

Date Of Review:

June 5, 2024