Growing up in Staten Island, New York, I lived just a few blocks away from a convent that ran a bookstore and a community festival that was a highlight of my childhood summers. My mother and my aunts, three of my uncles and both of my sisters were all educated by Catholic nuns. My sisters went to Catholic schools. My mother and her family, who emigrated from the Bahamas to New York in the 1950s, even lived for a time back then on a farm run by Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a candidate for sainthood. The church we knew tended to Irish and Italian immigrants, their children and grandchildren, and a smattering of Black families. So in 2016, when I stumbled across the story about the Jesuit priests who sold 272 people in 1838 to help keep Georgetown University afloat, I was astounded. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, the Catholic Church, like so many American institutions, was deeply rooted in what was essentially a slave society.