Nate Tinner-Williams Transcript — Oct. 6, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:03):
Session three of the October, 2025 widening virtual training. We’ll hear from a journalist who definitely heated a higher call in his career. Nate Tinner-Williams is founder and editor of the Black Catholic Messenger, a digital media publication covering stories of interest to African-American Catholics. He’s currently a master’s student in theology at Xavier University’s Institute for Black Catholic Studies. Nate is also written for National Geographic and he’s a contributing writer for the Boston Globe. Thank you so much for joining us, Nate.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (00:46):
Thanks for having me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:48):
As we said in the prep conversation, I think your story is the ultimate tale of synergy, serendipity, a lot of things coming together at once that led you to this latest venture of yours. I know you prepared a presentation for us, so I’ll turn that over to you.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (01:16):
Thank you so much, Rachel. So I will kick this off by explaining the title here because one might wonder what it means that I’m a reluctant journalist. I’m also a very relatively new journalist. Even though growing up I did have the dream of becoming a journalist, I actually did not start working full-time in journalism until I co-founded Black Catholic Messenger. There’s a lot to that story, but I know I’m probably not the first person to become a journalist kind of by accident. I may not even be the only such person in this call right now, but like I said, I was always interested in journalism and it really was serendipity that that passion came into intersection with religion only later on in my adult life. So I originally became a journalism major at Pepperdine University after growing up in Evansville, Indiana.
(02:23):
You’ll see our mascot here, Willie, the Wave Go Waves. I was a freshman journalism major there. After two years of studying journalism, I had a sort of pre-care panic attack. I didn’t think I could do journalism full-time as a nine to five. Now granted I never worked a nine to five, so really I had no idea what I was capable of, but at that moment I was like, I can’t do journalism anymore. I love it. But doing this as a full-time job, I don’t think it’s going to happen. So I ended up changing my sophomore year to theology, which was a new passion of mine there in college. More on that later.
(03:10):
So my religious background starts here at Little Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Newburgh, Indiana. This is the adjacent town to Evansville, Indiana, which is my hometown where I was raised in several Christian traditions, but it began in this small Black Baptist church in Newburgh. My father was actually a minister, so that colored my religious experience quite a bit and I would say it enhanced it as well. I had a very rich spiritual journey growing up. It involved the United Methodist Church where he later became a minister, non-denominational church in my hometown and also several other Baptist denominations over the years. Now, eventually I branched out on my own spiritual journey, still within Christianity, but I moved all the way across the country, so that helped me being able to go out on my own spiritually speaking. And it wasn’t until much later, several years after I graduated from college that I ventured out of the Protestant tradition. It was in San Francisco where I moved in 2018 that I first encountered the Eastern Orthodox Church, which was a tradition I learned about in college but did not experience firsthand until several years later. It was through Eastern Orthodoxy that I learned about and became more open to the Catholic experience.
(04:44):
Now, it was here that I learned about the black Catholic tradition here in San Francisco. I had never really known anything about black Catholics growing up in Evansville, Indiana. I didn’t think there were any black Catholics. I think I knew maybe one of all the black people that I knew growing up one black Catholic. So I was like, that’s not really a thing, but apparently it is. I learned that black people, black Catholics actually were some of the first people to reach the Americas even way before the founding of the United States. First in Puerto Rico in the early 16th century. And then about 50 years later in St. Augustine, Florida, which is actually the United States oldest city, that city was co-founded by free and enslaved black Catholics under the Spanish crown. I learned that black Catholics were also involved in the founding of Los Angeles where I went to college.
(05:42):
That city was founded in 1781 just a few years after the United States was founded on the opposite coast. I also learned that in present times there are hundreds of historically black Catholic parishes around the country, and I started attending one in San Francisco, and this was really crazy. At that same year that I was learning about all these things, I learned that my own maternal grandparents whom I had never met were black Catholics in Indiana, part of a long tradition stretching from the South Carolina coast inward through Kentucky and to Indiana. In 2019, I joined the Catholic church and started writing about the intersection between blackness and Catholicism. This was in a small publication called Where Peter is, and this was actually my first, this is my foray back into journalism after college. My first contact was writing about this topic, and at the same time I was reading a lot of Catholic media and learning that in the United States, it’s a very white phenomenon.
(06:53):
The largest public Catholic publications in the United States generally all are run by white people, staffed by white people, and most of the content they write about is about white Catholics or topics of interest to white Catholics. And this troubled me as someone who had learned quite a bit, kind of like a fire hose about black Catholicism in a short course of time and then saying that almost none of that history or experience was really reflected in Catholic media in the United States. Now this graph here so that you can understand it in the late 19th century was when the first black Catholic newspaper was founded. I put negative two in 1910 because by that time not only had the first black Catholic newspaper folded, but so had another one, and then another founded shortly after folded. And by the time I was considering the issue, there were none and there hadn’t been any for about a century.
(07:57):
Now around the time I’m thinking about it all, this was the racial reckoning in the United States following the revelation of the murder of George Floyd. And this was unfortunately only a temporary time, but a time nevertheless, when Catholic media was quite interested in writing about racism, about African-Americans, about the black experience. And so as I’m thinking about this whole topic, why is there no black representation in Catholic media and why is there no longer a black Catholic newspaper? Around that same time, I actually moved to New Orleans, which is arguably the historic center of American Catholicism and of black Catholicism, and I ended up being laid off from my job during the pandemic and I started to dream of a publication that would revive this tradition and lift up the voices of black people in intersection with Catholic media. Now, this sort of project was first undertaken per that chart in the late 19th century by Daniel Rudd.
(09:00):
In 1885, he started the first black Catholic newspaper in the United States. It was called the Ohio Tribune. This is when he lived in Springfield. He was actually a native of Kentucky, not far from where I grew up near Louisville, and he later changed the name of the publication to the American Catholic Tribune. It became a national black Catholic newspaper and he had several goals, but one of them was to make the Catholic church better understood among African-Americans. The other goal was to make African-Americans and their experience better understood by the Catholic church. Now as I said, his publication folded. It was actually before the turn of the 20th century, and in that vein of the American Catholic Tribune, the Black Catholic Messenger was founded in 2020. Now, I will describe this period since then as a five-year learning period. As I’ve said, I was not a full-time journalist before co-founding this publication, but somehow I became the editor of this publication pretty much out of necessity.
(10:08):
I had become a Catholic less than a year before, and suddenly I was responsible for kind of shepherding this whole project that I had helped to dream up, which brought me back into journalism unexpectedly or reluctantly as the title of the presentation indicates. Now throughout this period, I had retained my passion for journalism. I wasn’t working in journalism, but I loved to find a good story. I loved to ask questions to dig deeper into topics of interest that were sometimes hidden. And thankfully I had some journalism education, but I was still in some ways in over my head. I think faith and a whole hell of a lot of support from the community was key to sustaining Black Catholic Messenger from its earliest days. And just here, I’ll give a few tips perhaps on starting a new publication. By no means am I the expert, but it was so important that we had a plan that we didn’t go in blind. We knew what we wanted to do, we in fact knew the tradition of what we wanted to do. We knew about the previous Black Catholic newspapers and what they were about.
(11:20):
And another tip is to raise funds first if you can. We did this with BCM on a micro level. We’re not a huge publication. We certainly were not huge when we started, but raising a couple thousand dollars in 2020 before we launched was crucial. It would’ve been a disaster had we just tried to jump into it and say, oh, we’ll figure it out as we go along. Many things we did figure out as we went along, but having that little nest egg to start with was not one of them, and people were very, the reason we were able to raise a couple thousand dollars in a very short period of time was because people saw the need that we saw. If you’re able to tell your story in a way that resonates with people, a project that can get people excited, having that out there even before the publication is launched is a great idea.
(12:12):
Second thing is to have a great team around you. Don’t go away in alone. When I was thinking about starting a black Catholic newspaper, I could have tried to start at solo, the solo journalist idea, something that’s booming right now. I think in 2020. I was thinking there was no way I could do that, and I’m glad that I had that thought. Asking around, seeing who is interested in this project, seeing who would want to be involved in this project was so important to us getting started. Even from the basic things like having a website or what kind of website we should have, those kinds of things. I had no idea what I was doing. It was so important that we had early collaborators who said, I know something about this. Maybe go in this direction. Third thing, be unique. You don’t have to be the only player in your space.
(13:06):
Black Catholic Messenger is that we’re the only black Catholic newspaper in the United States, but I think anyone who’s starting a new publication is probably doing something unique. They think it’s something that is needed, something that doesn’t already exist. Lean into that. You should be able to express what makes this new publication different from what’s already out there and that’s what’s going to get people excited, get people interested. That’s what’s going to get people to support what you’re doing. And the last thing, be bold. Make a splash. Black Catholic messenger, like I said, we didn’t start out big, but we size wise, but we did start out with a bang. I think some of our early stories were the kind of stories that we knew nobody else would cover. That was part of why we were founded. And these stories, some of them blew up. It was our bold coverage covering stories in our way and our style with our specific angle.
(14:02):
It made a splash and we’re very proud of that. One example of that was early on the story of Amanda Gorman. I remember seeing her give her poem at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and at that time, anytime I saw something in the news involving a black person, my method was ask if that person is Catholic. Google it, ask around, figure something out because it’s a question that almost never gets asked. I think with a story, a big story involving a black person. Maybe you think of religion, maybe you think of Christianity. Almost never does a person think, I wonder if that person’s Catholic. That was what I started to ask about almost everything. So watching Amanda give her her poem, that was what I thought to myself. Now, originally, I didn’t find anything. It was not until after the inauguration ceremony was over that it was brought to my attention that her home parish in Los Angeles was run by a religious order that historically works with African Americans.
(15:11):
They had posted on their Facebook page, we’re so proud of Amanda, one of our Now no Catholic media had covered this angle of her story. We were the first, and this was our first viral story I think, that got eyes on black Catholic messenger, but also on the idea that black people in America, many black people in America are Catholic. And that was emboldening for us to know that people were interested in this kind of story or have it confirmed for us that we knew people were interested in this kind of story. And it all started with asking that story or asking that question, is there a Catholic angle here with an African-American story? Now, a little bit of statistics. There are 3 million estimated 3 million black Catholics in the United States, and that’s within Catholicism overall, which is the largest single religious denomination in the United States.
(16:13):
I think a lot of people don’t realize that there is no bigger branch of Christianity in the United States than Catholicism, so it makes sense that there would be a solid number of black Catholics. Now, that’s not a huge percentage of Catholics overall, but 3 million is not a small number. And this story kind of gets at another question we get, which is are all of our stories in BCM religious stories, religious and behind that I think is another sort of conundrum. What is really religion journalism? I would say it’s not just stories about religion. Our story about Amanda Gorman was not really a story about religion. It’s a story about Amanda Gorman, about the history that she made at the inauguration with the added angle that she happens to be Catholic, that that informs the work that she does. Within the 3 million strong black Catholic community, there are some of the most prominent names in the black Catholic community, often intersecting with crucial touch points of culture, art, governance, sports, education, justice, and all kinds of other topics, not just faith or religion.
(17:33):
I think of Simone Biles the greatest gymnast of all time. We were one of the few publications that covered the fact that she is a black Catholic. I think of Claire Bau Fontano who leads the nation’s largest organization Fighting Hunger, also a black Catholic, Kelly Robinson, the president and CEO of the human rights campaign, which fights for LGBTQ plus equality. Also a black Catholic April Ette president of the Service Employees International Union is a black Catholic. These are all people that we’ve covered as black Catholics in a way that other publications probably never even ask that question. How does faith inform how someone leads an organization fighting hunger or how someone participates in athletics? How someone fights for gay rights inequality? These are questions people would never think to ask, but I think as journalists, these are questions we have to ask. And with workers’ rights as well, with April, I think that in our space, black Catholic Messenger shed to light on unique American stories and that the sort of impact these stories can have is perspective shifting. It gets people to think about things that are not commonly associated with African-Americans or with black people in America. And like I said at this point, any large story, any big story involving a black person, I start researching whether they’re Catholic, including people when they die.
(19:12):
It’s strange to say one of my favorite stories, kinds of stories to write is obituaries where you get to see the impact of an entire person’s life. Often someone who people are very familiar with, but they just never knew this person was Catholic. I think of Hank Aaron when he passed away learning about his conversion story. And in the black Catholic community, there’s a lot of decon conversion stories because of the racism and other kinds of opposition people experience as black people. In the Catholic church, Roberta Drury is another story. She was one of the victims of the Buffalo Massacre in 2022. Barbara Ward Cooper, who was the oldest legislator in Tennessee history, the actor Tom Sizemore, who his story is very complicated but not uncommon in the black Catholic community where a person is light skinned, but they know that they have a black or mixed race parent or grandparent, but they conceal that.
(20:13):
He was an example of that. This was something I learned after he passed away. There’s Hughes Van Ellis, one of the survivors of the Tulsa race massacre. After his passing, I learned that he was a Catholic. Maurice Hines, Joseph McNeil of the Greensboro Ford. The list goes on and on and on. But these are stories in life and in death that we can expand our understanding of the black experience in America if we consider the faith angle and specifically a Catholic angle. Now of course, covering religion in the way that we do, at least it’s not always about feel good stories, especially in this moment that we are in now. Sociopolitically Black Catholic Messenger also covers a lot of difficult stories that buck trends in Catholic media because a lot of Catholic media is not independent Catholic media. A lot of it is owned by the church or by a religious order, and there are certain kind of stories they can’t tell, or at least there are ways they cannot tell the story because of their affiliations.
(21:18):
I think that’s one great thing about being an independent black Catholic publication is that we can highlight these stories in our way. One example is Seth Williams who was a DA in Philadelphia, and he was actually a cradle Catholic and he was one of the first attorneys, was the first attorney to file a suit against the Catholic church for clerical sex abuse, not of himself, but of his client. And he faced a lot of flack for that, and that story is not talked about very much, partially because he ended up having his own legal troubles, which kind of overshadowed his whole legacy as a da. But we had an interview with him shortly after our founding about his story of why he decided to file a lawsuit against his own church, his own faith tradition and how that led him down a path of a twisting path of opposition resistance and eventually redemption in his own career.
(22:24):
And I think this is the kind of unique coverage that shows how the Black Catholic experiences not a monolith, it includes a lot of stories of disappointment, disrespect, and even disaffiliation, which is a common theme in the black Catholic community. Now, I didn’t put this in the slides, but there was a recent Pew research study that showed that black Catholics are the most likely ethnic community within the US Catholic Church to disaffiliate as adults, people who were raised Catholic and later leave the church, that the highest rate happens in the black community. And I think that’s for a lot of different reasons. But for BCM, that is a very repetitive theme in a lot of our coverage and I think being the first and foremost publication covering stories of interest to African-American Catholics. In this day and age, we acknowledge that we are a religious newspaper, but big picture is our stories are not always about religion.
(23:26):
Black Catholics want to write and hear about government, technology, education, music, human dignity, and so many other topics in addition to explicit notions of faith and prayer and spirituality more broadly. And I’m proud to say that all of these kinds of topics are covered in BCM in our op-eds, in our stories, our podcasts and these stories. I think these perspectives are all the more essential today in this time of widespread social upheaval, often intertwined with the practice and abuse of religion, specifically Christianity, many of those speaking out in support of justice work today are in fact religious, but they’re religious and it’s not just purely motivated by politics or altruism or this more generic sense of justice. A lot of times these people are doing these things because of their faith that colors a lot of our coverage as well. And I think it’s a question journalists more broadly have to ask when they’re covering these sort of figures.
(24:32):
Now, I think most people would assume that religion journalism is simply the covering of religion in practice. I hope I’ve been able to sort of debunk that, but at the same time, it is part of what makes our publication go, it’s essential to our work. We, for example, have covered various stories on Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who is the first he for six years, he was the first black Archbishop of Washington, which is basically the highest position in the US Catholic Church. His tenure included the COVID-19 shutdowns, various moments of confrontation with President Donald Trump, Cardinal Gregory’s or his own promotion to Cardinal, which happened in the year 2020 and more recently, the onset of the Maryland Child Victims Act, which he and the Archdiocese of Washington actually opposed because these kinds of laws would they lift the statute of limitations, which around the country has bankrupted us dioceses.
(25:40):
And so it’s a complicated story covering these black Catholic leaders. It’s not always feel good stories, as I’ve said, sometimes it’s these very complicated stories of things that we as Catholics on the ground support. We think people survivors of clerical abuse for example, they should be able to get recompense for their suffering. But at the same time, we have black Catholic leaders who oppose that for their own reasons. Now of course, he’s one of several. Colonel Gregory is one of several black Catholic leaders in the United States, including another black archbishop who’s only the fourth in history, only the fourth African-American archbishop in history, Shelton FOB of Louisville. We have currently the first black immigrant to head a mainland US diocese Jock FOB of Charleston and several women who now lead domestic and international religious orders, including Sister Stephanie Henry of the Sisters of the Blessed Marshall Hall with the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore. And next year there will be Gail Tette who’s going to lead the Sisters of St. Joseph of Caron DeLeT.
(26:55):
Now this is more information on Car Gregory in a recent podcast we did with him earlier this year, he was also one of the first 10 African-American bishops in the Catholic church. He was one of the youngest bishops in the entire US Catholic Church at the time of his appointment. He was 35. I just turned 34 over the weekend. So I find that crazy to put it in a word. He was the first black president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. And when he became Archbishop of Atlanta in 2004, he was only the third African-American archbishop in Catholic history. And it’s interesting that even though he opposed the Maryland Child Victims Act, while he was president of the US Conference of Catholic bishops like 20 years prior, he actually spearheaded the zero tolerance policy of the US Catholic Church against clerical sex abuse. So again, these legacies are very complicated when you’re covering black people in the Catholic church, especially leaders.
(28:00):
He was also the first African-American to vote in a papal conclave. So when I was there covering that, that was part of my coverage that there had never before been an African-American who cast a vote for the Pope. And this was of course one of the most watched conclaves in history. Which brings me to my next point, Pope Leo, like I said, I was there in Rome covering the conclave. It was widely not expected that we were going to get an American pope. That was not in the air really much at all. We were thinking Africa or Italy, which of course is the most common place to get a pope from in the past several centuries.
(28:46):
I’m going to be honest, I really wanted a black pope. I didn’t care where he came from. It could have been Africa, it could have been Cardinal Gregory didn’t matter, I just wanted a black pope, but I had no idea who this guy was. Colonel Robert Prevo. I’d heard his name before I knew he was American but had no idea about his background. I was thinking run of the mill, not quite. So after he got elected and we were all up on the colon aid going crazy like, oh my God, it’s an American pope. Within a couple of hours there was the rumbling of his ancestry, the genealogist who helped put it out there, that Pope Leo had black ancestry. It’s actually a friend of mine in New Orleans, and I saw his Facebook post, which is crazy. Somebody would just put this out on Facebook like that, not trying to get it in the papers or anything, just like he just so happens to be a genealogy expert.
(29:44):
And he knows that the Pope has black grandparents. And I’m looking at this post like, okay, I guess this is my next story. And so for the next couple hours that night after Pope Leo was elected, I was writing this story. I was not the first to cover it. It was probably the second after the local papers in New Orleans because some of those journalists are also friends with that genealogist. But this is a very exciting story, one of our biggest views wise. But it highlights, as I kind of mentioned before, the black Catholic experience not being a monolith, but also featuring these racial complications because a lot of the history of black Catholicism in America has to do with the melding of Europe, with Africa, not just that they live in the same city, but that these people intermarry and that they have children.
(30:38):
Especially in New Orleans, you have the history of Creoles, which is where Pop Leo descends from. And identification as black or white is not as easy as we might think it is when we’re from other parts of the country and don’t necessarily know about that history. So I’ll say I think my four years of living in New Orleans prepped me a little bit for this story. To know that you kind of have to put a question mark as I did behind black Pope, because you have black grandparents, even if you have a mixed race parent in that context doesn’t mean you’re black. And for him, he and his, well his brothers have said they didn’t identify as black despite the fact that their grandmother was a mixed race black woman. So that’s part of black Catholic history. That’s part of what makes black Catholic history in America so exciting to cover.
(31:33):
You never know what to expect. I just never thought it was going to end up on the colony at St. Peter’s Basilica as the next Pope. And yet here we are. A fun story I got to write about in the past couple of weeks was Pope Leo actually acknowledging his ancestry publicly sort of publicly for the first time. His brothers had talked about it since he was elected, but polio himself had not said anything about his ancestry, his black ancestry, but a new interview from Crux Magazine and other Catholic publication run by Americans. They interviewed him for a book that’s about to come out and he openly said he knows about this, he has learned about it since the stories came out and that he has African ancestry. So I thought that was really cool that he’s not just the first to have this identity, but the first to actually say it out loud now it’s incredible.
(32:32):
So the question now I think is what is next for black HAC Messenger and for America? I think we are living in perilous times both for the media and for the nation at large. We can see what’s going on in Washington with the federal government. I think we have a pretty lawless leader interested in personal gain and story, how that’s affecting immigrants, how that’s affecting poor people, how that’s affecting minoritized communities right now is palpable. We all see it. And the attacks on the free press are also incredibly dangerous right now. And this is not disconnected I think from the Catholic church and also from the black Catholic experience, the church’s top leaders solid. Though they may be on some issues like immigration, they often participate in the social decay of the present time due to right wing sensibilities including white Christian nationalism among the Catholic bishops and an unhealthy idea of the relationship between church and state.
(33:43):
Now, add a little tidbit here that the Catholic church does not teach the separation of church and state. And historically the Popes have said that these are two things that actually should be, it should be like this. And they specifically called out in the past America specifically for having this idea. And they’ve tried to correct American Catholics to say, no, these two things should not be separate. And I think today we’re seeing the outworking of that, that a lot of our leaders do not recognize that separation. And it has fairly deleterious effects in practice and in Catholic media. I think shift gears a little bit, Catholic media suffers also because of these leaders who because of the sins of the past can no longer fund Catholic media the way they once could. Catholic newspapers around the country have been shutting down over the past couple of decades to the point that I think part of what is needed right now is a healthy climate of Catholic and religious journalism publications.
(34:49):
People have to be knowledgeable about these topics. They have to be willing to cover these topics and they have to be willing to ask that question about the angle of the stories they are covering. Not everything that appears to be a secular story is truly without the influence of religion. I think covering America from a religious perspective, which is what I now do every day, or at least with religious know-how is essential to accurately communicating what is taking place in America right now. Black Catholic Messenger is one of many publications that are in these trenches, but I think all journalists need to be ready to avail themselves and commit themselves to coverage that recognizes the influence of religion today and supports religious news publications because we certainly cannot win the fight by ourselves. And with that, I will hand it back over to Rachel.
Rachel Jones/NPF (35:52):
Once again, I have to say I am just overwhelmed by the Nexus world events and what was happening in the world when you made your conversion and then also when you started this publication. It’s almost do you feel, I’ll ask you again what I asked you the other day, do you feel as if you were called to this moment?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (36:20):
I think so. I don’t want to frame that in a way that puts me way up here somewhere. Again, this has been a collaborative effort with so many people, but I think being freed up in that moment to be able to lead this publication wasn’t something I planned, wasn’t something I expected. And even in that moment was like, I can’t, can I really do this? And so yeah, I think a lot of things providentially came together at the same time and that is why BCM has been able to thrive for these past five years. And so yeah, I think God absolutely had something to do with that.
Rachel Jones/NPF (37:06):
I see Mark Edwards has his hand raised, so introduce yourself and ask your question.
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (37:12):
Yeah. Hi, I’m Mark Edwards. I’m a video producer at the Washington ER here in Washington dc And actually I have enough questions to take up the whole rest of the time, but I’m going to ask you these two. Which one, just a clarification on your background. Was there a specific area of coverage, a specific story that made you want to do this? Because providing that coverage, you could have started a blog, it could have been a very individual process, but you decided it’s a whole organization and going into a field that you had previously had apprehensions about getting fully into in the past. So was it any specific event or story or thing that you was like, oh, we just needed to cover this and I can’t believe no one’s talking about it. Or more so kind of a sense of isolation based off it being a smaller community and one that people like my dad, he was raised Catholic but eventually converted to Protestants, so kind of the reverse process there. So I have some experience with people with that community just a little bit. So I was curious about that. And then the other question was how big was the team when you had first started? I know you mentioned it being small and as someone who’s potentially interested in starting an organization covering things that I’m interested in the future, how much money did you have to raise and how difficult was that to get an organization like this started?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (38:35):
Yeah, so to the first question, I would say it was more so the latter, just seeing a broad gap in coverage of black Catholics, especially in Catholic media. And another thing that I say is there’s a gap of coverage of Catholic communities and black media. That was also part of, we started why we started Black Catholic Messenger. So it wasn’t one story where it was like, oh, there’s this big thing that nobody’s going to cover and we got to cover it. It was like there are so many big things that we know have to be out there that are not being covered because nobody covers black Catholics specifically and nobody covers black Catholics with any frequency. So that was really what fomented our founding. How big was the team? I want to say there was probably a dozen people who responded to a specific request I made who wants to be involved with this? People who made suggestions about how to get started, the different things you need to do in order to start a publication and a website and these sorts of things. That team was probably about a dozen people. And how much money do we have to raise? I don’t remember the specific number. It wasn’t a ton of money because we’re digital only, so there wasn’t a lot of overhead to get started. But we are a nonprofit, so we had to pay $700 to apply for that.
(40:01):
And then maintenance fees for the website and things like that. I remember raising maybe two to $3,000 just to be able to cover those sorts of things in the beginning. And there was a third part of your question as well, I think,
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (40:17):
Or another part of your question. Oh, it was just on difficulty in finding a team. Was it difficult to raise funds and put these things to together at all? Because when you said a couple thousand, I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. But you’re a nonprofit, so I assume people are also just out of the good of their heart as well.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (40:33):
Oh,
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (40:33):
Absolutely. Yeah.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (40:34):
That’s what keeps us going. And another providential aspect was that during the pandemic, everybody’s at home and they’re on the internet. So that was part of how I think we were able to find the team so quickly. There was a big Facebook group that had been founded at the time for black Catholics, and it had gone from nothing to two or 3000 people overnight. And so it was there where we got a lot of interest in the beginning and a lot of our first team members came out of that group. And yeah, people in 2020 were willing to give to a black publication or just any sort of black cause at levels that we probably have never seen before. So the timing was right.
Rachel Jones/NPF (41:16):
Mark, any other questions? We’ll come back, circle back around to you, but right now I see NPF’s very own. yidney Clark has a question for you, Nate.
Sydney Clark/NPF (41:28):
Hi Nate. We’ve met briefly online when you joined, but I work for NPF full-time, but I also freelance on the side for Tulsa Spirituality Center, which you helped connect me with the editor there. I mostly have a comment. So as a black Catholic myself from New Orleans, that was the norm to me growing up. Being black and Catholic was the norm. And so when I moved away, I’m now in DC and I went to school in Mobile, Alabama for college. When people realized that I was Catholic, they were like, what a black Catholic. It was something they’ve never heard of. But that was just the norm to me growing up, listening to gospel music, looking at Jesus as a black person and other saints in the Catholic church as black figures. And I feel like this is such a good time to be a black Catholic, a proud moment to be a black Catholic because currently there’s seven African-American Catholics that are being considered as saints, which is huge because all of the thousands of thousands of saints in the Catholic church, and these are people who are martyrs who prove their life to be faithful and died for their faith essentially.
(42:42):
These are the VIPs of the Catholic church and we don’t have a single African-American person in that saint hood. This is a crucial time, I think, for black Catholics to really promote these people, these seven people. One of ’em is from New Orleans, Henrietta Delal, and really just say, these people are black, they’re Catholic, and this is what you can learn from them. You don’t have to be religious to take away something that they did throughout their life. And so well, one of my questions to you is people really don’t realize that being considered a saint is super a long process. It takes funds, you have to do research, you have to verify that they perform a certain number of miracles. And so do you think that we could see, I don’t know if you have a guess of who could out of that number, who would be the first to be considered a saint?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (43:38):
That’s a great question. Honestly, I couldn’t say if the easy answer is the ones who are the furthest along or who’ve been around the longest that would be, and from New Orleans, Pierre from New York and Tolton from Chicago. All of them have been venerable for the longest. And just for anyone who doesn’t know, venerable is the last stage before being beatify, which is basically when you can start naming churches after people and so forth, you can build shrines to the person and then they become a saint after that. Now, both of those stages require each a miracle confirmed. So usually somebody prays to that saint or the saint to be heal me from this thing. If the doctors say there’s no medical explanation for the healing, then the Vatican could confirm the miracle. Then the person gets, if it happens again, they get canonized. So again, I don’t know who’s going to be the first. Sometimes I’m pessimistic, I’m like, maybe it’s never going to happen because the black struggle is a struggle and it’s no less of a struggle in the Catholic church. So it’s possible that sadly, maybe nobody gets beatified. I hope and pray that’s not the case, but I really could not say who is the most likely to be the first. But my God, I hope it happens soon and I hope it happens under prop. Leo I, he’s black
Rachel Jones/NPF (45:09):
Sydney, you brought to mind a point that I wanted to pursue a little bit further as well, which is sort of the overall demographics of your audience. I wonder if it’s primarily older black Catholics, or what is the younger demographic like amongst your readership?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (45:33):
Well, it is not easy for us to track that sort of thing, but just anecdotally from people who reach out to us, people that I know in the community, black, younger, black Catholics, well, let me first say, like I said, the attrition rate among black Catholics is relatively astronomical People regularly, I think more than half leave the Catholic church having been raised in it if they are black in America. So the young people who stay or who at least still identify as Catholic, they may not be practicing. They’re looking for a side of the church that is focused on justice, that is focused on renewal, that is opposed to racism, these sorts of things. And black Catholic Messenger sometimes is a place where they can see that witness amplified. So I couldn’t tell you that this percentage of our readers are young people or anything like that, but I can tell you that the ones who do read our publication read it for those sorts of reasons. They read it because it’s the only game in town for black Catholic. But that it also is emphasizing the parts of the faith that African-Americans generally are interested in Christianity that works, that does good, works in the world, that is on the right side of history rather than the wing of the church or the actions of the church that calls people to leave.
Rachel Jones/NPF (46:59):
I guess the reason I ask is that I did not know that Simone Biles was Catholic or Amanda Gorman, so that’s fascinating to me. And those are two obviously public figures that young people could rally around. I see. Alicia has a question.
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (47:21):
Hi, Nate. I’m Elisha Brown, reproductive rights reporter at States newsroom. Thanks for speaking with us. My question is about a news event during the last election. Another recent Catholic convert is Vice President JD Vance, and during one of the debates he made these really frankly incorrigible remarks about Haitians in Ohio and Haitians, perhaps I did a quick Google search and it was ai and that AI is unreliable, but perhaps roughly half are Catholic, Haitian Americans, Haitians in general. So did your organization, how did you approach coverage of that topic or how do you approach coverage of perhaps some of the more incendiary things that JD Vance given his stature says about Catholicism?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (48:24):
Yeah, that was actually the source of a couple of really important stories for us. Obviously not just because JD Vance is Catholic, but because so many Haitians are, as you mentioned, Haitians are really also integral to the history of black Catholics in the United States through Florida and New Orleans and also in New York, that area, so many black Catholics in the United States are of Haitian descent. And so for him to say something like that about this not well-known community in that part of the country, that part of Ohio was so heinous and a lot of the responses from Catholics, black Catholics is what are our leaders going to say about it? Are you going to stand up and say that these two people, not just Vance, but Trump, who amplified that sort of rhetoric about Haitians as well, are you going to stand up and say that what they’re doing is wrong and that it conflicts with the Catholic faith?
(49:23):
In many cases, our bishops did nothing, didn’t say anything. A couple did including some in Ohio, but it was not at the level that black Catholics were looking for. And often that is what black Catholics are looking for. Our leaders going to stand up for us when it matters. We’ve seen it happen more recently when Charlie Kirk died and several bishops decided to basically canonize him overnight, and we can’t get one black saint, black African-American saint, but they’re canonizing Charlie Kirk after all the crazy stuff he said about us. So this JD Van story was very similar in that people are looking for a anti-racist witness from Catholic leadership and to acknowledge that these immigrants are an essential part of our community in America. And that was a part of the narrative in Ohio that a lot of even white people there were saying, these are good people.
(50:16):
These people came here to work. We don’t have any issue with these people. It was simply a matter of bad politics that JD Vance decided to attack this community to rile up his base. And obviously that’s unacceptable according to Catholic teaching, which is also part of what we emphasize. And one last thing, if I recall correctly, Pope Leo before he was Pope Leo, he was active on Twitter, and this is one of the things he talked about was how wrong JD Vance was on this issue and related issues. So we did get some pushback from our leaders, including the future Pope, but again, not at the level that it should have been because a lot of the bishops basically said Catholics should vote for these people, Trump and Vance. And then, yeah.
Rachel Jones/NPF (51:13):
Do you have a sense that there is a sort of cross denominational feeling about what’s happening in America today? Are you picking up any sort of echoes of concern? And I know that obviously for black Catholics and thinking about the issue of Haitians and their treatment is something that sort of rose to that. But from your perspective, is there kind of a united feeling about what’s happening in America?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (51:56):
I would say so. I think when you talk about the sociopolitical situation right now, the African-American community and the consensus there is shared ecumenically, it’s black Catholics understand it, black Protestants understand it. I will say I wish there was more collaboration in the way that, for example, I’ll just be specific, organizations will put out a statement saying, we’ve got faith leaders to sign on to this statement about, for example, the racist actions against Haitians. A lot of times those statements will have a whole laundry list of black clergy, but no black Catholic clergy. I don’t know the cause of that. I don’t think it’s because black Catholic clergy don’t agree. I don’t think they think about black Catholic clergy when they think, let’s go talk to black clergy to see who will sign on to something like this. So I wish there was more collaboration, and I hope that when people turn to the black community to wonder what our leaders are saying in the religious community, that they will remember black Catholics we’re here, we got plenty of clergy, we have bishops, we have women religious. Don’t forget about them. When you’re putting together statements and you’re taking a pulse of what the black religious community is saying, the black Christian community is saying, don’t forget black.
Rachel Jones/NPF (53:26):
Well, the flip side of that for me, I guess would be in this current climate, do you ever come across those who say, why are you singling out black Catholics? It should just be the Catholic experience, and why should we care about that? Is that something you ever come across?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (53:44):
All the time. All the time. They will say, why are you putting black in front of Catholic? That’s racist, or that’s subtracting from Catholicism in some way. I don’t think that’s the case. You don’t hear that when people talk about Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics. You shouldn’t feel that way when we’re talking about black Catholics. I think there’s lots of underlying reasons that people have that knee-jerk reaction like, oh, black Catholic, no, but it’s not based in anything that the church teaches. It’s not based in anything that Jesus taught. I think it has more to do with people’s own cultural background and their ideas about black people that makes them think some type of way when they see those two things together, black and Catholic. And it’s also because people don’t know about black Catholics. So even seeing black Catholic together at all is new for them and they’re trying to process it. And a lot of times, yes, I think the conservative impulse says, no, you got to separate race from religion. But at the end of the day, race has never been separated from religion.
Rachel Jones/NPF (54:55):
Well, if there are not any other Zoom hands, I want to sort of wind it down by asking you, what’s your vision for the publication? Where do you want to be 10 years from now? What do you want the publication to have accomplished?
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (55:16):
I think the struggle of nonprofit news is apparent today. It’s not easy to raise money. It’s not easy to, for us specifically, it’s not easy to get past that or get over the hump of bootstrapping from the beginning. We were working with not a lot of resources. And how do you get to the point where you are sustainable in the same way that larger publications are? How do you become one of those larger publications? I hope that in 10 years, black Catholic Messenger can say that about itself, that we’re not scrappy anymore, that we don’t have to categorize ourself that way, that we will be more sustainable financially, that we’ll have a staff that it’s not just like a tiny news organization. But yeah, being able to grow to get to that point is definitely a goal for our next five year anniversary. We’re celebrating five years next month. So
Rachel Jones/NPF (56:22):
Yeah,
(56:23):
Early happy anniversary. Thank you. Well, I hope you’ll take this. I was muted. Sorry about that. Early happy anniversary. And I hope you will take this the right way when I say, thank God that you stayed in journalism or you came back to journalism because your story of the evolution of this publication, of your reasons for doing it is fascinating and offers so much insight for journalists who are thinking about ways to have their lived experience contribute to communication and in communities. So Nate Tenner Williams, founder and editor of the Black Catholic Messenger, thank you so much for joining Whitening the Pipeline today.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (57:25):
Thank you so much for having us and to everyone in the room, support, religion journalism
Rachel Jones/NPF (57:31):
Will do, and they have your email address and we will be posting your presentation on our website. So again, this has been a tremendous conversation and I thank you for joining us.
Nate Tinner-Williams/Black Catholic Messenger (57:46):
Thank you so much for having me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (57:48):
Take care.
