PALO ALTO, California (LifeSiteNews) — Stanford University’s Memorial Church hosted a “Beyonce Mass” on February 23.
The service did not worship Beyonce specifically, but was about taking the church and liturgy and making it about racism and black empowerment, according to the organizers.
“Beyoncé Mass is a womanist worship service that uses the music and personal life of Beyoncé as a tool to foster an empowering conversation about Black women—their lives, their bodies, and their voices,” the organizers explain on their website.
Yolanda Norton, Black Church Studies chair at San Francisco Theological Seminary, created the service and began offering it in 2018, according to The Stanford Daily.
“Throughout the ceremony, six female singers, along with several accompanying musicians, performed notable Beyoncé hits such as ‘Superpower’ and ‘I Was Here,’ as well as traditional Black spiritual songs like ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’” the campus paper reported.
The ceremony ended with the collection of “communion items” according to The Stanford Daily as well as a rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer, the one Christ himself gave us, to an “Our Mother.” It is not clear that the prayer is actually to Mary, the Mother of God.
“Toward the end of the service, audience members moved to the front to collect communion items,” the campus newspaper reported. “The ceremony ended with a recitation of an altered version of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Mother, who is in heaven and within us … deliver us into community,’ they prayed.”
One student said the event contrasted with her experience with Catholicism at home.
“Anastacia Del Rio ’25 said that ‘having [her experience] reframed as a way to empower women of color and Black women definitely made the whole idea of religion a little bit more appealing,’” the campus newspaper reported.
There is no video available from the Stanford event, but the Kennedy Center posted footage from the event it hosted in March 2020. The woman leading the event called the rewritten female-centric prayer the “Womanist Lord’s Prayer.”
The womanist prayer is followed by a Beyonce song titled “Love on Top.”
Yolanda Norton, the creator the event, gave a speech at the March 2020 event. “Y’all, I’m tired. I’m tired, I’m tired of turning on the television and seeing the blood of Black bodies running in the street,” she said.
“I’m tired. I’m tired of brown people being turned away at borders that welcomed white folks,” she said. “I’m tired. I’m tired of being ignored, tired of people trying to appropriate my identity. I’m tired of people calling me an angry Black woman as if I don’t have the right to be angry.”
She also appeared to criticize Christians who oppose abortion and support the truthful definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. “I’m tired of well-intentioned white folks, tired of divisive Christians, tired of stupid political and religious debates that tried and regulate people’s bodies and who they love,” Norton said at the March 2020 event.
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