“The glorious city of God is my theme, my dearest son, Marcellinus”
By Marcellus Allen Roberts *
The “heart check.” Before leaving the county jail for prison, an inmate will have heard about it, dreaded it, feared it, trembled. The heart check is the legendary inaugural ceremony of a prison sentence, where a new “boot” must prove he is worthy to live on the cellblock of his assignment by entering into hand-to-hand combat with two or more inmates of his same race, simultaneously .
Why the same race? It is to certify that he is willing and able to defend himself and others of his own race in the event that a race riot occurs. The logic is this: in the chaos of spontaneous violence, it is easiest to differentiate “others” from kin by skin color.
Now, had I used this type of racial reasoning while I was questioning God about the exact nature of his True Church, I wouldn’t be Catholic today. It would have been too easy to dismiss its verity at a glance. Let me give you an example. In 2015 I revealed to my cellmate my interest in joining the Catholic Church, and his response was, “Isn’t that a white Church?”
I don’t believe my cellmate was a racist, but he did have some false notions about the racial demographics of the Catholic Church. My solution was to apply a salve to the racial wound my cellmate was suffering.
It so happened that I had a copy of selections from the Church Fathers. I showed him two names: Cyril of Alexandria and Cyril of Jerusalem. His stare was blank at first, then it waxed thoughtful. Through my cellmate’s gangster-life exterior I could see that he had been ever-so-lightly touched. His street name was Cee-lo, but his mama had named him Cyril on his birth certificate. And though neither of those Church Fathers was a black African, I was able to show him that Cyrils had joined the Church in the past and there was still room for more.
It would have been infinitely difficult for me to accept that Jesus was calling me to Catholicism had He not so soothed my own racial wound. A couple of these instances are worth citing.
A FIRE IN THE BONES: Reflections on African-American Religious History, by Albert J. Raboteau
The first work written by a Church Father that I ever read was St. Augustine’s City of God. It was an old hardback translation from the fifties. The pages were crispy as Pringles; if you handled them too roughly, they’d flake off at sharp angles, turning to confetti in your palms. The book had the smell of dust and stale cigarettes, taking me back to the consignment store my mama used to frequent when I was a child. There was a used bookstore in the backroom, and I’d venture back there to rifle through the westerns, looking for a Louis L’Amour novel to purchase for a dollar while the store clerk puffed away on Pall Malls.
“The glorious city of God is my theme in this work, which you, my dearest son, Marcellinus, suggested, and which is due to you by my promise.” (City of God, Preface, St. Augustine)
I read the first sentence of St Augustine’s preface and got the eerie feeling that the words had traveled across sixteen hundred years for the specific purpose of reaching me at that moment. I never expected to see a derivative of my first name in an ancient Christian text. How could I not see myself as the “dearest son, Marcellus, of the Doctor of Grace?”
I consumed the whole tome, start to finish, delighting in the truth that St. Augustine, though probably not black, was truly African and my spiritual father.
That brings me to another instance of God addressing my racial wound that happened after my confirmation.
Accepting my place in the Catholic Church meant parting ways with many of the non-Catholic Christians with whom I had previously enjoyed fellowship. What I felt most acutely was the distancing from other African-American Christians. This was an organic but painful ostracism that proceeded naturally from choosing a relationship with Christ in the Eucharist above every other created thing. When I stopped attending Protestant services and began attending Mass exclusively, I got questions. When I withdrew from general Bible studies and began instructing other inmates on the Bible in the light of Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium, I got bewildered looks. Soon, I started to feel like the “other” brother.
It was a tough time. I love the way Albert Raboteau described being black and Catholic in America in his book, A Fire in the Bones. He said he was a “minority within a minority.” I couldn’t have said it better.
There was one particularly intense exchange between another black inmate and me over some point of the Faith which kept me up all night afterward. The following day I was so vulnerable from lack of sleep that I lost control of my emotions and vented my frustrations to my Catholic brothers. I wept, in public. I felt misunderstood and alone, impotent against the invincible ignorance of my people. I was going through a real trial and in need of a breakthrough, and God knew it.
My breakthrough came from an unexpected source: a book by a journalist for the New York Times on the postcolonial violence of West Africa in the 1990s. Early in the book he quotes medieval correspondence between King Afonso I of Congo and King João of Portugal, dated 1526.
In this 16th century colored engraving, the king of Congo João I receives the homage of a group of Portuguese
I was drawn in. Especially since my father’s side of the family still carries our Portuguese last name, it appeared I might have stumbled upon some family history. The letter was an eyewitness account of the devastation wrought by the African slave trade. King Afonso bleeds his heart upon the page in striking detail and with an air of dignity that commands admiration:
“And we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the mentioned merchants are taking everyday our natives, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives…”
I could feel myself getting angry, and righteously so. “…because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are ambitious of…”
The temptation to hate the perpetrators dangled before me like low-lying fruit and I couldn’t stop reading.
“… they grab them and get them to be sold, and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and Your Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service.”
I was totally absorbed in the text, fully committed emotionally.
Then, as if on cue, as if he had known I would need a timely sign of God’s grace, King Afonso penned the simplest, sweetest, most beautiful phrase that could have followed after the scenes of horror he had just described — and the root of bitterness in my heart was defenseless against it.
“And to avoid it we need from those [your] Kingdoms no more than some priests and a few people to teach in school, and no other good except wine and flour for the holy sacrament.”
Wait a minute! What? He didn’t ask for vengeance, retribution, restitution, or reparations, not even an apology. King Afonso asked only for what was already owed to him from a Christian kingdom: priests, teachers, and the Holy Sacrament. Wow.
While the Protestant Reformationists were busy rending the seamless garment of Christendom, throwing Europe into chaos and bouts of spontaneous violence, there were West Africans, sub-Saharan Africans like me, who already harbored a love for the Eucharist in their hearts — a love that was not irritable or resentful.
Since discovering the letter of King Afonso, I have never questioned whether the Catholic Church is where all nations, tribes, peoples and tongues can find the fullness of what Jesus won on the cross. God gave me a heart check, a Catholic heart check, to certify that the Catholic Church is where I belong. It is where my people belong, where we all belong.
*Marcellus Allen Roberts is a 40-year-old Prison Oblate of St. Benedict’s Abbey, Atchison, Kansas. He is serving a 25-year penance in the state of Texas.
