Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Sister Thea Bowman (Bertha Elizabeth Bowman)
Franciscan Sister and evangelist; first Black FSPA at St. Rose Convent in La Crosse; Viterbo faculty
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Sister Thea Bowman (born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman) was the Mississippi-born Franciscan who formed in La Crosse, taught on the bluff at Blessed Sacrament and Viterbo, and later told the U.S. bishops what it meant for Black Catholics to come to church fully functioning. She was the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent, and the convent and college remain the La Crosse stretch of a life Mississippi claims for sainthood. Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, on December 29, 1937, and raised in Canton as a doctor’s only child, she converted to Catholicism at nine after Franciscan sisters from La Crosse opened a school for Black children. At fifteen she told her Methodist parents she was going north to join the order; they refused until a hunger strike changed their minds. In 1953 she entered St. Rose as the only Black sister in the house and took the name Thea, for the Blessed Mother and for her father, Theon. La Crosse trained her: she taught at Blessed Sacrament, earned an English-speech-drama degree at Viterbo in 1965, took a Ph.D. from Catholic University in 1972, and returned to teach at Viterbo into the late 1970s. Mississippi got her later as a preacher and as a builder of an African American Catholic hymnal. Mike Wallace put her on 60 Minutes in 1987. On June 17, 1989, already in a wheelchair with cancer in the bones, she addressed the U.S. bishops; they stood. Boston College gave her an honorary Doctor of Religion that year, the first African American woman so honored there. She died in Canton on March 30, 1990. The Diocese of Jackson opened her cause for canonization in 2018.