KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
February 12, 2021
By Stephen G. Adubato
Leticia Ochoa Adams’ project helps conference organizers diversify voices
After learning about her own family’s intergenerational wounds from racism, Leticia Ochoa Adams began to see the Catholic Church’s complicity in racism and set out to change the church’s narrative when it comes to issues of race and social justice.
Last October, the writer and mother founded the new website, Catholic Speakers of Color, which aims to help conference organizers find a more diverse array of Catholic speakers. The online platform features 53 speakers, including Adams, who represent a variety of ethnicities and skin tones.
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Although baptized Catholic as a baby, in junior high school she became a devout, “Bible-thumping” missionary. “I’m a natural radical. When I see truth in something, I jump all the way into it,” Adams said. She remembers collecting tracts and carrying around her Bible at her junior high school so she could quote Scripture to her peers during lunch.
But a series of tumultuous events led her away from her missionary impulse. She faced repeated emotional and sexual abuse during her teen years, gave birth to her first child at 16 and got married for the first time at 19 to a man she barely knew. After having three more children and miscarrying one, her husband’s drug addiction drove them apart. They were divorced after eight years of marriage. After her second marriage, she wanted to settle down so she moved to the suburbs with her family.
She describes her reversion to Catholicism (what her former church community told her was the “whore of Babylon”) in 2010 as a “joke of God,” attributing it to the omnipresence of Marian images in her family members’ homes. “There’s something about being in a house with 40,000 Mary statues … she tilled the soil for me.”
She describes how she found healing from her sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, namely in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the writings of Catholics like Edith Stein, John Paul II and Teresa of Avila. It was reading the saints that changed her “us versus them” mentality. The saints showed her that we are all sinners, all broken and wounded, and in need of Christ’s healing love.
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