“The discipleship, worship, and witness of Eastern Catholics from the ancient Christian communities of North Africa, the Middle East, and South India both reveal the early colonization of Christians by Christians and challenge the current Americanization process of the US Catholic Church, which has at times unwittingly succumbed to the false promises of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. ”
The Council of Jerusalem (~ 50AD) marked an irreversible leap in the expanding catholicity of the early church by allowing Gentile converts to be free from Mosaic law. From this point forward, the Holy Spirit prompted the early church to “be responsive to the demands of the gospel [by] continually ‘reinventing’ itself as it struggled with…new situations, new peoples, new cultures and new questions” (Bevans & Schroeder, 2004). Yet, as my socio-historical and ethnographic research of diasporic Melkite Catholics (Lebanon and Syria), Ge’ez Catholics (Ethiopia and Eritrea), and SyroMalabar Catholics (South India) reveal, homogenizing logics of Roman latinization, European colonization, and white supremacist racial formation in the US have continuously threatened to distort the expanding catholicity of the Spirit. Amidst these pressures, my research not only captures the initial responsiveness of these ancient peoples to the Gospel during the first four centuries, but also the cultivation of distinct pre-colonial expressions of discipleship, worship, and witness that continue to be practiced in the US. Because globalization has led to an unprecedented proximity of these distinct expressions of Catholicism, my project considers the soteriological significance of working towards reconciling cultures of encounter such that the catholicity of the US church no longer seeks false forms of uniformity to express its unity.