This biography gives the life story of a significant figure in modern day
Catholicism. It is the story of a woman who will make one stand in awe of the God who was her Maker and her Lover. It seems that God put a new song in her heart and in her mouth, a song which she was intent on singing even in the final stages of the cancer which came to claim her body but could not weaken her brave soul. She became a model for what God can do when one lets God’s joy permeate one’s whole being, one’s daily living in good times and in bad.
Sister Thea Bowman became the African American teenager who went off to Wisconsin to join an all white community of Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration and to find St. Francis who became her model of simplicity and holiness.
Bertha Bowman was born in 1937 to an African American Protestant couple in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her father was a country doctor who ministered to the poor of the vicinity; her mother was a teacher.
When the Franciscans came to
her town to open a school, Bertha’s life took a new turn as she watched these valiant women open their hearts and their home to the poor children of her town. When she was eight she asked to be baptized as a Catholic; later her parents also joined the Church. At fifteen, Bertha joined the Wisconsin community and became known as Sister Thea.
Her life in an all white religious community was not without problems. The food, the daily schedule, the lack of southern songs which had so filled her early life, the silence, the sight of all those white Sisters, her early bout with tuberculosis, all tested her and she was not found wanting. Assigned to teach children, she became the favorite teacher to dozens of students. Thea gave her all in whatever way she was tested. She was so proud of her heritage and
wanted the whole world to know how much the African American culture contributed to make her country a good place to be. Sometimes this did not set well with her religious Sisters, but she never let it daunt her.
When her elderly parents needed her help, Thea received permission to move to her home town to do ministry in the
diocese but also to assist her parents in whatever way she could. There were constant calls for Thea to sing and to give lectures all over the States and in foreign countries. She spoke to bishops and kings, to rich and poor, to the educated and the illiterate. The cancer which was eventually to take her life did not dim her energy and enthusiasm for speaking about her culture of which she was so proud. Only Thea’s death in 1990 could still that voice which ever believed, “We shall overcome.”
(Thanks to Sr. Irene Hartman OP for this review.)
