The delegation from the Brooklyn Diocese contained no Black members a week before it was to attend the U.S. Bishops’ Bicentennial conference in Detroit last October. A concerned caucus of Black parishioners pro-tested the exclusion. As a result, five of the twenty-eight delegates were Black.
Black participants at the conference devoted to “Liberty and Justice for All” called on the Catholic Church to oppose racism within its ranks and within American society. In doing so, Black Catholics reaffirmed their Black solidarity without disclaiming their loyalty to the church. They indicated their identity, as Blacks and as Catholics.
Through three centuries the American Catholic Church has posed the question of the proper Black role within the church. The initial exclusion of Blacks from the delegation symbolized the church’s longstanding ambivalence. Now Black Catholics have insisted that they, not the church, provide the answer. They have chosen to be advocates within the church for American social reform regarding Blacks. Today they are prompting the church to pressure American society for racial change. The question remains whether the church will respond affirmatively to the Black appeals, and in effect recognize the role Black Catholics have chosen.
Most historians agree that during the colonial period of American history the Catholic Church granted more religious respect and privileges to Blacks than did Protestant Churches. The four Catholic settlement areas of what is now the United States—Florida, Alabama, Maryland and Louisiana—formulated codes which gave Black slaves the right to baptism, freedom from work on Sundays, church marriages, burial in consecrated ground; the church encouraged humane treatment of slaves and manumission of converted Blacks.
Catholic liberality toward slaves became a sore point for Protestant slaveowners (who discouraged and even forbade the baptism of Blacks because English law suggested that no Christian could be held in bondage). A 1745 letter from the Protestant Governor of Maryland warned Catholic leaders that their integrated religious ceremonies were causing Protestants alarm that Catholics would foment slave uprisings.
But whereas the official church position regarding slaves was relatively progressive (the Papacy opposed the slave trade from 1839), individual Catholics and orders of priests held slaves and the church’s directives were not always followed by Catholic slaveowners. No evidence demonstrates that Catholics treated slaves any better than did Protestants. The supposedly benevolent attitude of the Catholic Church toward Black slaves was primarily theoretical and not carried out in fact.
In the North, there was friction between free Blacks and the newcomer Irish, competing for jobs, political patronage and housing. Throughout the nineteenth century Irish gangs were responsible for anti-Black riots, including an 1829 Irish riot in Cincinnati, an Irish riot in Philadelphia in 1834, and the infamous “Draft Riot” in New York City in 1863. Blacks associated the Irish with Catholicism, and anti-Irish feelings among many free Blacks turned into anti-Catholic feelings. Moreover, the Catholic Church, eager to escape the frequent charges by Protestants that it was a foreign and subversive organization, attempted to acculturate itself and its members as far as possible in the South by supporting the slave system during the ante-bellum slavery debate. Even in the North, the anti-slavery position of some Catholic leaders like Bishop John England was seemingly in the minority. By the time of the Civil War much of the Catholic press, North and South, at- tacked abolitionism more than it did slavery. Officially the church was not pro-slavery; slavery was looked upon as a political issue, less important than spiritual issues and consequently the church did not take an official stand. A distinguished historian has chided the church for its lack of “farsighted or courageous leadership” during the slavery debate, noting that “members of the hierarchy by taking refuge in a conservative church tradition, entirely remote from the contemporary issue, contributed to the general impression that their church was pro-slavery.”
At Emancipation there were approximately 100,000 Black Catholics in the United States, mostly in Maryland and Louisiana, although there were San Dominican and Cuban refugee Black Catholics in a few American coastal cities. At the Second Plenary Council in Baltimore in 1866 Bishop John Spalding and others called for an effort to convert and educate Blacks, but there was a lack of enthusiasm among American Catholics for the job. Father Herbert Vaughan, the English founder of the Josephite Fathers, toured the United States in 1871 in preparation for a mission to Blacks. He stated that local Catholic priests treated Blacks “like dogs,” and he found that many Catholics thought Blacks had no souls. He often encountered official church hostility toward his missionary work.
In 1884 the Third Plenary Council reviewed the work already done and found little progress in either conversion or education of Blacks. The Council created a Commission for Catholic Missions Among the Colored People and Indians, called for priests and nuns to work among Blacks, and ordered a collection to be taken each year in every parish for Black missions (a collection that was blatantly ignored by many parishes). For the most part, Catholics did not respond to the call, and by the time of the large migration of Blacks to cities and to the North in the 1920s there were still few Black Catholics.
Catholics did not seem eager to have Blacks. Blacks did not seem eager to become Catholics. In the North they disliked the Irish. In the South they shared the general Protestant fear of supposedly subversive and foreign Catholicism. Blacks living in the rural South rarely had contact with Catholics, but any Blacks who became interested in Catholicism thought twice about converting because being Black was enough social stigma without becoming Catholic. In addition, there were only four Black priests in the United States before 1914; without Black leadership, Blacks were not likely to join a church. Blacks wanted control of their own churches during the post-Civil War period and the structure of Catholicism did not lend itself to local autonomy. As a result of these factors, few American Blacks had converted to Catholicism before 1920.
From the end of World War I to the end of World War If, over 2,250,000 Blacks left farms in the South for Southern (and then Northern) urban areas; today over 75 percent of Blacks live in cities. As they entered these cities, they moved into geographical areas which the Catholic Church calls parishes. A Catholic parish is not a congregation of certain people; it is a geographical entity which remain fairly constant once established irrespective of its inhabitants. As Blacks moved into areas like Harlem, the white parishioners left, but for the most part the priests and the churches remained. It was this situation—Blacks coming into contact with white Catholic parishes which were emptying of their white parishioners—that began a period of Black conversions to Catholicism.
In 1928 there were 203,986 Black Catholics; in 1940 there were 296,998. In 1947 there were 343,667; in 1957 there were 575,925; in 1967 there were 808,332. Today there are close to a million, or one out of every 50 U.S. Catholics. The growth rate of Black Catholics has been greater than that of white Catholics through the last fifty years. The greatest concentrations of Black Catholics are in cities of Lafayette, Louisiana (over 75,000—the largest Black Catholic diocesan population), Washington, D.C., New York and Brooklyn, Galveston, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit. The largest Black parish today is Corpus Christi in New Orleans with over 12,000 parishioners.
The strongest attraction of the church has been for middle-class Blacks. Interviews with converts in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago have shown that desirable features include: celibacy of clergy, absence of money scandals, restraint of ritual. New converts in these cities have been largely teachers, professionals, white-collar workers. The Catholic Church had a respectability they liked, and appeared receptive to Black participation.
Another reason Blacks converted was their desire to send their children to Catholic schools, where supposedly the discipline was better and morals were more strictly emphasized than in public schools. Catholic schools in many urban areas admitted non-Catholic Black children as a conscious missionary tactic; Blacks sent their children to Catholic schools and became attracted to Catholicism.
But the Blacks who did convert to Catholicism soon discovered that the church’s Jim Crowism left Blacks on the borders of participation and use of Catholic facilities. Because they sought autonomy, some Blacks had accepted the policy of segregated churches set into motion by the Third Plenary Council; in fact, many Blacks had asked for separate churches in the late nineteenth century. But they soon realized that their being segregated did not lead to autonomy; rather, they were separate but still controlled by whites.
The church spoke of the virtues of indigenous Black culture. One respected Catholic wrote in 1941 that it was not necessary or desirable “to make the Negro an imitation white man in order to solve the so-called Negro question. The Negroes themselves have a race pride which will resent any such objectives.” This sounds like fine sentiment today, but it was used then to insure the segregation of Blacks, keeping them from the best Catholic school facilities, from positions of power within the Church, from hospital care, from becoming priests and nuns, and from fully participating in the life of the church. In the late 1930s a priest at St. Charles Borromeo in Central Harlem carried a bullwhip to keep Blacks away; another Harlem church shut down for two years to avoid admitting Blacks. In the North as well as in the South Blacks were forced to sit in the back of Catholic churches when attending integrated services and were expected to receive the Eucharist last. These examples of racial discrimination were hardly the result of a benign church’s desire to foster Black “race pride.” Eighty percent of Black Catholics in the United States were members of segregated parishes in 1940.
Not only were Black laypersons segregated; so too were Blacks studying to become priests and nuns. Only since 1955 have Catholic orders accepted Blacks except in segregated orders. In 1970 only 900 out of 176,341 nuns in the United States were Black and of these two-thirds were in the three specifically Black orders: the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Family and the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary. There have been even fewer Black priests in America. The first, James Augustine Healy, was ordained in 1854. In the hundred years following his ordination, only 71 more Blacks became priests in the United States and although the 1960s saw a sharp increase in the number of Black priests, there were only 150 out of 55,581 priests in America in 1967, many belonging to segregated orders such as the Society of the Divine Word. Apparently the church was not encouraging full Black participation, much less Black leadership or Black autonomy.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s Black Catholics pressured the church to integrate its facilities; however, it was the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision which forced the church to integrate rather than risk the loss of federal aid for schools and other facilities. Since then, the church’s desegregation policy has been to follow the state in initiating change, to wait until it becomes legally necessary to integrate, while in theory attacking racism and racial discrimination. In 1958 the United States Catholic hierarchy spoke decisively against racism, calling the question a “moral and religious” issue, firmly condemning segregation, and admitting that segregation had led to oppressive conditions for American Blacks. But whereas the statement was issued unanimously, there was bickering among the bishops behind the scenes and in fact the statement did not immediately result in a change in segregation policies within the church.
In the South only San Antonio integrated its schools and other Catholic facilities; whereas the church moved toward integration more quickly than did the rest of the South, it was far behind the national racial policy. In “border” cities like St. Louis and Washington, D.C. it took new bishops, Joseph Ritter and Patrick O’Boyle, to begin integration, and even then the movement was slow and resisted by the white laypersons in the dioceses. Some orders of nuns fled the Black urban areas along with their white lay constituents rather than teach Blacks. In 1967 the United States Office of Education ruled that many Louisiana Catholic schools were not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and into the late 1960s the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare was still pressuring several Catholic dioceses to desegregate. This pressure might have continued if H.E.W. had not ceased to care about integration during the Nixon regime. The fact is that de facto segregation has continued within the Catholic Church despite the church’s official anti-racism pronouncements.
The reasons for this lingering racism are many, not the least of which is that the Catholic Church and its members in America have continued to share in the racism which is seemingly basic to American thought. Father Lawrence Lucas, one of the leaders of the recent Black Catholic movement, has said that “The Roman Catholic Church in America looks white, thinks white, and feels white. It prays white, worships white and in relation to black people, believes preeminently white … it is legitimate to call it a white racist institution.” Father Lucas’s claim is not far from the mark. Even when the church has not shared in blatant racism, it has fre- quently pandered to it, especially in the South.
Moreover, the Catholic Church has continued to view spiritual issues as essential and social issues as peripheral. Race relations have officially been a low priority for the church in America. Even when the hierarchy has decided on racial change, local parishes and individual Catholics in the North and South have dragged their feet. As an example, diocesan schools and hospitals in the North were integrated long before private Cath- olic schools were. In Louisiana (where half the Ku Klux Klan membership is said to be Catholic, despite church prohibition) many white parishes have objected to the assignment of Black priests or the issuing of religious books which present Blacks and whites together. In Chicago a Concerned Catholic Parent group asked the F.B.I. in 1967 to investigate the Archdiocese because of a catechism with Civil Rights content. In the previous year white Catholic teenagers wearing scapulars and Catholic school sweatshirts threw bricks, bottles and verbal abuse at Catholic nuns and priests marching with Rev. Martin Luther King to protest segregated housing in Chicago. Even when the Catholic hierarchy and individual clergy have promoted racial equality within and without the church, they have been met with white Catholic lay resistance and hostility.
White racism has been exacerbated by the fact that in many Northern cities over 40 percent of the parish churches have been organized on a nationality basis. These ethnic blocs resisted Blacks by forming real estate clubs, “improvement associations,” which kept Blacks out of white neighborhoods, thus out of the parish. In Chicago this practice was supported by many ethnic clergy in the more than one hundred national parishes. Today such blatant racism is rare, hut subtle racism continues despite the widespread integration of the last few years.
Ironically, as the Catholic Church’s facilities were finally integrated officially in the late 1960s, Black Catholics were finally realizing that integration itself was not such a significant goal as had been thought. Within the church as within the American society as a whole, Blacks—as Blacks—were seeking power for themselves, seeking the same privileges held by other Catholic ethnics.
The seeds of the modern Black Catholic Movement were planted at the first Negro Catholic Conference in 1899. This agency, which lasted for five annual meetings, consisted of Blacks and whites, and although it was in fact controlled by whites, it represented the first attempt by Blacks to gain some power within the Catholic Church. In 1925 Dr. Thomas Wyatt Turner, a Black botany professor, founded the Federated Colored Catholics of the United States, a better organized version of his earlier Committee Against the Extension of Race Prejudice in the Church. These organizations and the Black participation in the Catholic Interracial Council, formed in 1934, were further attempts by Blacks to participate more fully in the mainstream of the church. Increasingly Blacks saw Catholicism as a means of achieving Black goals, just as Black Protestant organizations have served as Black self-help groups. Moreover, as Blacks’ expectations of Catholic racial progress were raised, they were continually disappointed by Catholic accommodation to racism. This disappointment resulted in an alienation from the church and feelings of cynicism toward it. Blacks were identifying more and more as Blacks, and less as Catholics; by 1968 a strong Black power movement within the Catholic Church was underway.
In that year the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, composed of Black priests and brothers, met for the first time and called its church “racist.” Later in the same year the National Black Sisters’ Conference was organized, and by 1970 the National Black Catholic Lay Caucus was meeting. Affiliated with these three organizations and in support of their activities was the Na-tional Office for Black Catholics. Created in 1970, NOBC’s goals included sharing Black Catholic culture with the church at large, gaining greater Black participation in the church, and encouraging the church to pay closer attention to the needs of the Black community.
The important feature of these thrusts of the movement was that they were made up totally of Blacks, a fact that did not fail to upset white conservatives who had always supported Black meetings and parches as long as they were run by whites. Also in 1968 an article appeared in Ebony by Saundra Willingham, explaining why she, a Black Catholic ex-nun, had left her religious order. She wrote that when she had begun to feel a need to express and experience her Blackness during the Civil Rights movement, her fellow nuns could not understand her desire and did not sympathize with the Civil Rights movement in general. Her superiors warned her against concentrating on race; she felt closer to her Black friends and family than to her sisters in the convent who, she wrote, expected her to be “white.” She said: “It became increasingly clear to me that I had to make a choice between the white authority-bound institution into which I had put myself and the black race into which I was born.” She chose her race and left the convent (but not the church; she remained a Catholic who recommended the convent life—for whites). Her decision to embrace her Black identity was echoed by many Black Catholics over the next few years. By 1970 the first National Convention of Black Lay Catholics was condemning the Church’s “missionary attitude” toward Blacks, proclaiming: “We are Black first and then Catholic.”
The Black Catholic Movement has sought to express Black cultural forms and solidarity, but it has not been satisfied with supposed Black liturgy—spirituals, jazz, spontaneous testimonials, shouts and clapping—in Catholic churches such as St. Francis de Sales in New Orleans. “Soul” masses have not made Blacks any more an integral part of Catholicism; neither have they given Blacks more power within the church. Beyond liturgy Black Catholics have sought a Black theology emphasizing freedom, pride and the right of Blacks to share in this world’s goods.
Blacks have asked for the sharing to begin at home, inside the Catholic Church. They have called for more Black priests in positions of power, beyond the 10 or 15 Black pastors and four Black bishops in the United States, only one of whom is actually head of a diocese—Bishop Joseph Lawson Howze of the newly created Diocese of Biloxi in Mississippi. They have demanded a recruitment program for Black priests and deacons and diocesan-supported agencies for developing Black leadership, resulting this year in the formation of a New York Archdiocese Office of Black Ministry. They have asked for an autonomous, Black-directed department of the U.S. Catholic Conference. They have called on the church to use its economic and political power to effect social change for the good of Blacks, as Project Equality, initiated by the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice has used Catholic purchasing power to work desired secular reforms. They have insisted that the church campaign against racism within its own ranks.
The Black Catholic Movement has fought the closing of Catholic schools in Black neighborhoods, even where the majority of students attending the schools have been non-Catholic Blacks. Many Black parents consider education more important than religious programs and they think the church should subsidize its schools for Blacks. Furthermore, they insist that Black communities should control the Catholic schools in their communities. Thus far only one school has achieved that goal—St. Joseph’s in the Roxbury Section of Boston, which has a 15-member parent board that has final say on teacher selection and curriculum; most of the students there are non- Catholic. The Black Catholic Movement would like to see more of this type of arrangement, in which the church pays the bills and the Black parents make the decisions.
Most fundamental, Black Catholics have sought to be full-fledged members of Catholicism, not wards of the church. Father Lucas has stated the Black complaint that “within the church, Black people are a controlled fringe group. The general role assigned to them is to be the recipients of white, Christian generosity and love. This generosity and love is really euphemism for patronage.” Clearly Blacks have wished to be truly integrated into the church, but without sacrificing their Black roots. Newark’s new Black auxiliary Bishop Joseph Francis, president of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, finds it “unfortunate that we’ve too often seen ourselves as rather marginal in the hierarchical structure.” He tells Black Catholics, “We have to see ourselves as an integral part. For those who don’t see us that way, that’s their problem, not ours.”
Thus far the Black Movement within the Catholic Church has resulted in only a few of the proposed reforms. The white hierarchy has listened to Black demands, but without acting on most of them. Within many parishes the Black Movement remains a remote issue. The Catholic Board of Negro Missions and the Catholic Interracial Council seem uninvolved in the Movement’s plans and activities, and the Brooklyn Diocesan delegation to the U.S. Bishops’ Bicentennial would have included no Blacks, had Black parishioners not protested. While many Black demands such as the one for Black bishops of Black dioceses are not unreasonable, the strict seniority system of promotion within the Catholic hierarchy has been difficult to circumvent.
In the face of slow progress the Black Catholic Movement has resisted any temptation to withdraw from the Catholic Church. James E. McNeil, former executive director of the National Black Lay Catholic Caucus, said in 1974 that while Blacks must give advice to the church, they cannot become separatists: “There can be an organized Black movement within the church but not a separate Black church because that would go against the whole idea of Catholicism as the universal church.” Last year a spokesman for the National Office for Black Catholics noted that those Blacks who became disillusioned with the church left it as individuals; “they didn’t create any splinter movement.”
To the contrary, recent statements by Black Catholic leaders indicate their trust in the church. Brother Joseph M. Davis, executive director of NOBC, rejects the notion that a Black schismatic movement was even a distant possibility in recent years. Instead he finds “greater Black participation in the church today than there was six to eight years ago,” reflected in larger Black representation at national and diocesan meetings and the growing number of Black bishops. He does not think that all reforms have been accomplished, but he states that “progress has been made.” Other Blacks view the church’s anti-abortion stand as a bulwark against genocide. In such a light the church becomes a protector of the Black community.
Black Catholics today are reaffirming their bonds with other Blacks; however, they are not rejecting their identity as Catholics. They remain hopeful agents of racial progress within the church.
