Christian eschatology provides a compelling mystical-political framework both for unmasking the historical visage of racism and for calling White believers to conversion and racial solidarity. Juxtaposing the memoria passionis of the Black community with Vatican II's mysticism of communion with the dead, the author asks what it would mean for White Christians to place themselves under the judgment and mercy of the Black "cloud of witnesses." The author proposes three moments in the complex dynamic of conversion in Whites, a life-long process in which Blacks, both the living and the dead, must hold some degree of agency. The essay concludes with a meditation on purgatory.
"T HE TRUTH OF THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL," writes Reinhold Niebuhr, "is apprehended at the very limit of all systems of meaning. It is only from that position that it has the power to challenge the complacency of those who have completed life too simply, and the despair of those who can find no meaning in life." 1 This article is an attempt to place Catholic theology, or more accurately, the White Catholic imagination, "at the very limit" of its customary and complacent systems of meaning, here represented by 400 years of Black suffering at the hands of Whites in the United States. The song "Strange Fruit," which Billie Holiday recorded in 1939 and sang until her death in 1959, serves here as a figure for what is a radical limit of meaning, a shadowy realm of unmeaning, for most White Christians and Catholics in the United States.CHRISTOPHER PRAMUK is a doctoral student in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. In 1994 he earned a master's degree in theology from St. Thomas Theological Seminary, Denver, and then served on the faculties of Regis Jesuit High School, Aurora, Colorado, and Regis University, Denver. He is especially interested in contemporary Christologies, theology of religions, Black theology, monastic theology, sexuality, and spirituality. His publications include "'Living in the Master's House': Race and Rhetoric in the Theology of M. Shawn Copeland,"