Black Catholics Research Articles

Augustine Tolton’s Struggle as a Black Catholic against Discrimination as Portrayed in From Slave to Priest by Caroline Hamesath and They Called Him Father Gus by Roy Bauer

This thesis aims to analyze how Black Catholics overcome the discrimination against their life in American society during the nineteenth century and also to explore what are the impacts of Black Catholics struggle portrayed in the biographies entitled From Slave to Priest and They Called Him Father Gus. The interdisciplinary approach applied in this thesis are including literature, sociology, and the concept of time and macro to micro by McDowell are used to enhance the analysis of Black Catholics’ struggle against the discrimination that they got in American society during the nineteenth century.The findings of the thesis show that Black Catholics did some actions to overcome the discrimination against their life in American society. The actions done by Black Catholics are the sign that they work hard struggling against the discrimination from whites, Catholic Church, and Black Protestants. Also, since this thesis highlights the impact of Black Catholics’ struggle, it indicates that the struggle of Black Catholics, represented mostly by the struggle of Father Augustine Tolton, give the positive impacts such as maintaining the good relation among black and white Catholics, inspired Black Catholics to keep struggle for their faith and inspired the establishment of Black Catholics’ organizations. Key words: Black Catholics, Father Augustine Tolton, Struggle, Impacts

Matthew J. Cressler. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.

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Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration, by MATTHEW J. CRESSLER

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration, by MATTHEW J. CRESSLER

Augustus Tolton: The Church Is the True Liberator by Joyce Duriga

Reviewed by: Augustus Tolton: The Church Is the True Liberator by Joyce Duriga Gary B. Agee Augustus Tolton: The Church Is the True Liberator. By Joyce Duriga. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. 128 pp. $14.95. On February 13, 2012, the Vatican named Augustus Tolton a "servant of God," thus formally beginning the process of canonization. This nineteenth-century priest consecrated in 1886, was the first openly recognized African American to be ordained in the United States. Tolton's name, however, does not generally appear in histories of American Catholicism. The decision by Liturgical Press to include Duriga's study of Tolton in its "People of God" series, a set of biographies honoring influential twentieth- and twenty-first century Catholics, will no doubt introduce him to a wider, more diverse audience. [End Page 81] Augustus Tolton was born in Brush Creek, Missouri in 1854. His mother Martha Jane Chisley was a native of Meade County, Kentucky. She was separated from her parents and forced to move to Missouri as part of a dowry settlement. While residing in a land far from her place of birth, Stephen Elliot who owned Martha's family died. Fear that she would be separated from her children might have been the impetus for her decision to escape with her family to the North. Though nearly apprehended by Confederate soldiers, the refugee family arrived safely in Quincy, Illinois, buoyed by Martha's Catholic faith. As Duriga's work shows, Augustus's road to the priesthood was not an easy one. He began work at the age of nine in a tobacco factory, a position he held for nine years. Laboring in this environment likely was detrimental to his health. Tolton was able to attend school only during the winter months. Even as the curious young man sought to improve his lot through education, he was forced to endure the racially charged taunts and sneers of younger white students. Tolton's faith in the Catholic Church was bolstered by the kindness of Father Peter McGirr, who helped the dedicated young man discover his vocation. Despite Tolton's piety, however, a number of seminaries refused his admittance. He was forced to wait ten years before being accepted to the Urban College in Rome. Upon completing his seminary training, Tolton was sent to the Diocese of Alton (now Springfield), Illinois. The young priest was assigned to St. Joseph's Parish in the town of Quincy, where he initially ministered to both white and black Catholics. Serving in his home community, Tolton sought to create an interracial fellowship similar to what he had observed in Rome. Residents living in the Quincy area, however, were not ready for this level of racial interaction. Tolton promoted the Catholic Church as the "liberator of all," but at times, Duriga's work offers evidence to the contrary (57–58). Ironically, the cleric's most serious opposition came from Father Michael Weis, pastor of St. Boniface Parish. Weis appears to have been most angered by the financial support Tolton received from white Catholics in the [End Page 82] area. After lobbying for a transfer to Chicago, Tolton went to work among the city's African American population. Much of his effort was given to raising money to build St. Monica's parish, the city's first black Catholic church. Throughout his ministry Tolton declared that the Catholic Church was the teacher of all nations. He argued as did other black Catholics that there was no color line within its walls. Readers of Duriga's work will likely come to the conclusion that these claims were more aspirational than descriptive. Working with few resources and little support took a toll on Tolton. He died on July 19, 1897. He was forty-three years of age. Duriga is due credit for giving attention to this important nineteenth-century Catholic leader. Her offering is a brief but accessible introduction to Tolton. It will serve as a valuable resource for individuals with limited knowledge of Tolton and Catholic ministry efforts among African Americans in the late nineteenth century. The book might also be used for small group study. Duriga's offering makes use of Tolton scholarship previously published, including...

Cressler, Matthew J. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2017. xiii+263 pp. $89.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsCressler, Matthew J. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2017. xiii+263 pp. $89.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).Timothy MatovinaTimothy MatovinaUniversity of Notre Dame. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 99, Number 1January 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700421 Views: 63Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

Book Review: Matthew J. Cressler: Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

Book Review: Matthew J. Cressler: Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler

Reviewed by: Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler Kim R. Harris (bio) Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 288 pages. Five members of the Black Panther Party and fifty others identified as "Concerned Black Catholics and Whites Concerned about the Black Community" occupied the narthex of St. James Church, Chicago, for a first "Black Unity Mass" on January 5, 1969. Members of the Chicago Police Department's "Red Squad" tactical unit observed the protest, taking notes on what they dubbed a "prayin." During the same hour, "regular" church goers attended Mass in the nave of St. James, undoubtedly hearing the prayers and freedom songs ringing out from the demonstration. Ironically, the protestors' General Intercessions, controversial in their time, have a contemporary ring. Their prayers for Black pride, unity, faith and in honor of a Black Baptist minister could appropriately be offered in 2018, for one of the many Catholic liturgies in celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Similarly, the fact of present-day Black Catholic celebrations in parishes and cathedrals, accompanied by piano, drums, electric bass, interpretive dance and diocesan-wide gospel choirs, was made possible, in part, by the confrontations, prayers, determination, and cultural evangelization of Black Catholic Chicagoans. Historic and present-day liturgical comparisons and the detailed descriptions of ecclesial conflicts in Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, underscore author Matthew J. Cressler's thesis. He contends that undergirded by official changes in the Catholic Church's liturgical practice and engagement [End Page 123] with the "modern world" after the Second Vatican Council, the intersection of Black Catholics in the United States and Black Power in the late 1960s and 1970s ignited a revolution in the expression of Black Catholic identity and in the community's worship style. In particular, Cressler attributes both local and national influence among Black Catholics, as well as in the wider United States Catholic Church, to the courage and "missionary" zeal for ecclesial self-determination and cultural relevance of Black Catholics in Chicago. Cressler begins by documenting the exponential increase in the numbers of Chicago's Black Catholics from 1940 to 1975. Most were converted to what they came to believe to be the "One True Church," universal and above the racial color line. White religious, women and men of orders such as the Society of the Divine Word and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, self-described "missionaries," dedicated themselves strategically and systematically to the conversion of newly arrived African-Americans of the "Great Migration." Cressler illuminates his research with converts' personal testimony gathered from journal entries, interviews (many conducted by himself), letters, and other archival materials. Cressler offers a complexity of reasons for the African-American conversions. He contends that not only the prospect of greater educational opportunities, but also the experience of "quiet" and "dignified" liturgies, the inspiration and maintenance of family relationships, and the chance to "be somebody" all impacted conversion decisions. Cressler highlights the so-called "Chicago Plan" of mandatory family religious education and Mass attendance for all who sent their children to Catholic schools, as a foundation for many conversion choices. The author's analysis contains little comparison between the Chicago Black Catholic mid-twentieth century conversion experience with that of African-American Chicagoans who chose other "high church" Christian denominations, also featuring "quiet" or "dignified" liturgies. He makes strong connections, however, between the converts' embrace of new devotional traditions, their chosen separation from former associations, and alternative participation in contemporaneous "religio-racial movements," including the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of the Living God. Cressler provides a riveting telling of the struggles for Black Catholic self-determination between priest-activists such as George Clements and Rollins Lambert, along with Concerned Black Catholics, the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Afro-American Patrolman's League and Chicago's Archbishop Cardinal John P. Cody. He also includes accounts of [End Page 124] intra-group leadership and...

Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States: Essays from the US Catholic Historian ed. by David J. Endres

Reviewed by: Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States: Essays from the US Catholic Historian ed. by David J. Endres Michael Skaggs Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States: Essays from the US Catholic Historian. Edited by David J. Endres. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. 202 pp. $34.95. Editor David Endres observes that this special collection of U.S. Catholic Historian essays can "serve as a model for the historians engaged in the effort of charting the complexity and diversity of American Catholicism" (vii). The essays, which were originally published between 2008 and 2014, do so admirably in their attention to Latino/a Catholicism in the United States, Catholic women, black Catholics, and the ecclesial activism of the American hierarchy in the Cold War. Because Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States consists solely of articles published in the journal, a brief synopsis of each article and an evaluation of the collection's impact will have to suffice. Timothy Matovina draws attention to one of the field's longest-standing problems, namely a heavy geographic focus on the eastern portion of the United States. While conceding that this has historically been a weakness of all of American religious historiography, he nonetheless notes that not taking a wider view—in this case, even a hemispheric view—entails overlooking the massive contributions to American Catholicism by Latino/a immigrants. Jeanne Petit narrates the civic activism of Catholic women, who formed a powerful voice for women and children in the early twentieth century but nonetheless represented a mixed blessing "to a hierarchy who were, at best, skeptical of the ability of Catholic women to be political actors and, at worst, saw organized women as a dangerous force" (63). The political and cultural climate of the late 1920s, however, [End Page 75] quashed most hopes for Catholic women to function as a cohesive power in either Catholic or civic life. Amanda Bresie's colorful account of Katharine Drexel's benefactions to Native American missions suggests that class modifies Petit's argument for the role of Catholic women: as Drexel had enormous financial resources at her disposal, her ability to shape mission work was almost unrivaled in the American church. Drexel's example furthermore contests the notion of Christian missionaries acting solely as colonizing agents of Euro-American nationalism-imperialism, with the Blessed Sacrament mother superior bankrolling native suits against the federal government on land reclamation. Kristine Ashton Gunnell's essay on the Daughters of Charity in Los Angeles stands on its own merit but works especially well when read alongside the essay by Bresie and Matovina. The Daughters' focus on "respect for the individual and human dignity … counteracted some of the most pernicious aspects of Americanization," seeking not to melt immigrant culture in the American Catholic pot. Anne Klejment's essay pairs Dorothy Day and César Chávez as catalysts to lay activism, radically embracing poverty and nonviolence in advance of similar movements that would not flourish until well after the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, their drive against injustice held little regard for denominational boundaries, placing them once again in the vanguard of American Catholicism by "partner[ing] with non-Catholics who shared their values and occasionally borrowed their ideas" (142). Matthew Cressler's article on the emergence of Black Catholic liturgies in the explosive atmosphere generated by the combination of Black Power and Vatican II calls attention to internal debates over "authentic black" Catholicism. Cressler notes that "for black Catholics, the experience of Vatican II was inseparable from Black Power"—whether those same black Catholics favored the Black Power movement or not (146). Some felt that liturgical worship offered black Catholics a unique opportunity to express their cultural patrimony, while others "strongly objected to the idea that the Mass could (or should) include distinctively black practices or address political concerns" (156). Finally, Joseph Chinnici pans out from the national and identity-based focus within the previous articles, instead arguing that American Catholicism in the postconciliar era cannot be understood apart from its intrinsic connection to a—and, eventually, the—global superpower. Not least from this framework emerges the particular relationship between...

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler

“Authentically Black, and Truly Catholic”: A survey of the study on Black Catholics

AbstractBlack Roman Catholics have been a contributing community to American culture as far back as the nation's founding. Despite nearly three million Black Catholics in the United States today, sociological research has given little consideration to this community. This review makes a case for more sociological focus on Black Catholicism. I review the available sociological research on Black Catholics and include a review of scholarship on Black Catholics from outside the discipline. I argue for the sociological importance of Black Catholicism to the examination of race, religion, and identity formation.

Black Catholicism and Black Lives Matter: the process towards joining a movement

ABSTRACTThis ethnographic study examines how Black Catholics identify with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. The study follows several national Black Catholic gatherings since the death of Mike Brown. Using an adaptation of Scott Hunt, Robert D. Benford, and David Snow's social movement frame analysis, I explore how Black Catholics define and construct the ongoing political issues within the Black Lives Matter movement. I discuss the conditions which contribute to Black Catholic’s participation, or lack thereof, in this social movement through the processes of diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and motivational framing. I position the larger Black Catholic belief system within frame analysis, examine the relevance of the frames with the Black Catholic community, and analyse the frames’ timing with the Black Lives Matter cycle of protest. This research has implications for intragroup meaning making as Black Catholics start the process towards identifying with the Black Lives Matter social movement.

Sister Thea Bowman: Liturgical Justice Through Black Sacred Song

Sister Thea Bowman, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of La Crosse, Wisconsin, believed that the justice of God includes racial justice for her people—African-Americans in the United States and persons of African descent around the world. She advocated for racial justice both within and beyond U.S. Black Catholic communities. This advocacy extended to the inclusion of Black historical and cultural traditions within liturgical gatherings. One aspect of Black Catholic liturgical-cultural inculturation, as researched, taught, and championed by Bowman, was the liturgical use of historic Black sacred song—the spirituals. The challenge and gifts Bowman presented to the Catholic Church of her time included her work on the first edition of the groundbreaking Black Catholic hymnal, Lead Me, Guide Me (1987). Her efforts for racial justice reverberate to the present in the liturgical and musical scholarship, compositions, and practices of Catholic scholars, musicians, composers, and communities.

Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914–1954 by Timothy B. Neary

Reviewed by: Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914–1954 by Timothy B. Neary Eileen M. McMahon Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914–1954. By Timothy B. Neary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 272pp. $45.00. Timothy Neary’s Crossing Parish Boundaries examines the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) founded in Chicago in 1930 by Bishop Bernard Sheil. Sheil aimed to attract working class youth tempted by a secular world into morally-based athletic competitions. From the beginning, Sheil’s hoped to use the CYO as a mechanism to bridge the racial divide that threatened the stability of Chicago’s Southside neighborhoods since the advent of the Great Migration. The CYO’s foundation rested on parish-based men’s Holy Name and Big Brother Societies and school gymnasiums and community centers. Although a small minority of the city’s African American population, Black Catholics from St. Monica’s, St. Elizabeth’s, Corpus Christi, and St. Anselm’s were eligible to play in its leagues. Sheil’s view on race was based on a simple spiritual principle—African Americans were a part of the body of Christ and equally eligible to participate—hence the title Crossing Parish Boundaries. Recognizing its glamor in a rough, industrial world, Sheil organized boxing matches. That success led to the creation of other sports competitions in basketball, track and field, swimming, and summer day [End Page 99] camps. The CYO also supported young women’s athletics. As a charismatic leader, Sheil attracted the attention and support of local and national sports figures to promote the CYO. Neary argues that Sheil and the CYO fostered lasting positive interracial experiences for white and black youths. Neary also claims that this interracial experience factored into ties between the Chicago Irish political machine and black Catholic politicians. In this regard, Crossing Parish Boundaries adds to the history of Catholic Chicago and the interaction of racial groups in urban America. Neary, however, argues that his book “presents a counternarrative to the dominant historical interpretation of white ethnic Catholicism rejecting everyday interracialism in American cities.” This “counternarrative” is not an original argument, nor is his claim correct that the dominant historical literature presents a rigidly racially divided Catholic American experience. Neary argues against one book—Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (1996) by John McGreevy. McGreevy’s fine book does examine Catholic parish throughout the North and argues that interracial cooperation was a rarity and failed to achieve any lasting success. Although his study focuses on Chicago Catholicism, Neary overlooks works by Jeffrey Burns, John Kotre, and James Smurl, that would have contextualized his study and told a far more complex story on Catholicism and race in this city. The Catholic Interracial Council and the Christian Family Movement were both founded as lay organizations and headquartered in Chicago. Their inspiration came from the same Catholic Social teaching of Monsignor Hillenbrand and operated local “cells” that “crossed parish boundaries.” Chicago also hosted a vital Young Catholic Worker movement that reached out to youths—black and white—across the city. While they did not create an integrated society any more than the CYO, they did transform attitudes and lives in much the same way Neary claims the CYO did. Neary also overlooks the findings of my book What Parish are You From? A Chicago Irish Parish Community and Race Relations, 1916–1970 [End Page 100] (1995), which documents the work of Chicago Catholic clergy and laity who crossed “parish boundaries” for racial justice on Chicago’s Southwest Side in the 1950s and 1960s. St. Sabina pastor Monsignor John McMahon helped found the Organization of Southwest Communities (1959) with the Catholic Interracial Council and priests inspired by Monsignor Hillenbrand. Its goal was to create stable, harmonious, integrated neighborhoods. To achieve that end, the OSC and its member churches not only “crossed parish boundaries” reaching out to African Americans, it also created an ecumenical movement by including Protestants and Jews. Like the CYO, the OSC did not achieve a racial utopia in Chicago. Because of its commitment to Catholic social justice, however, St. Sabina’s did not racially “turn overnight...

GLOBE US Leadership Preferences versus Black American Catholics’ GLOBE Leadership Preferences

GLOBE US Leadership Preferences versus Black American Catholics’ GLOBE Leadership Preferences

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious Shannen Dee Williams (bio) Paintings and sculptures of black women religious produced during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and photographs taken of black sisters before the turn of the twenty-first century are invaluable historical artifacts. Because so much of the history of black Catholic sisters has been systematically erased and made inaccessible by archival restrictions, visual sources are sometimes the only evidence available to researchers – beyond oral history – that document black sisters’ presence and experiences of racial segregation and exclusion in religious life.1 This is especially true for the church’s earliest black sisters and African-descended women and girls who entered European and historically white sisterhoods in the modern era. In an effort to bring more attention to black sisters’ rich, but often elusive, visual history, this issue of American Catholic Studies features seven pieces of visual art and photographs that survey their history from the rise of transatlantic devotion to St. Iphigenia (cover image) in the sixteenth century through the canonization of St. Josephine Bakhita in 2000. These selected images not only document black sisters’ pioneering histories in female religious life, but also chart their fiercely contested presence in the church when most equated whiteness with purity and holiness and blackness with evil and moral debasement. Unsurprisingly then, several of these images have been used by black Catholics and other members of the faith at various moments in history to promote black evangelization and contest white supremacy in the church and wider society. [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo Courtesy of Ben Tavener The eighteenth-century statue of St. Iphigenia (shown above) enshrined at the renowned and slave-built Sao Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil is one such example. Although extant church records reveal that Iphigenia and her convent of 200 Nubian virgins pioneered female religious life in the first century, widespread devotion to the church’s first black sister-saint did not begin until the late sixteenth century.2 This followed the forced conversion of [End Page 94] millions of Central and West Africans to Catholicism during the transatlantic slave trade and African dispersal throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world. As historian Erin Rowe has demonstrated, the veneration of sub-Saharan African saints by black Catholics and other members of the church’s faithful resulted in “the widespread distribution of images, including sculpture, painting, and engravings” of Iphigenia in Iberia and Latin America. 3 This visual art, often commissioned by black confraternities (lay associations), combined with fervent devotion, enabled African-descended Catholics struggling to free themselves from the chains of chattel slavery, European colonization, and racial apartheid to forge an alternative spiritual discourse on blackness that rejected demonization.4 It also seemingly inspired free and enslaved African-descended Catholic women and girls in Iberia and Latin America to seek freedom and other opportunities to expand their social mobility through various forms of female religious life. In late seventeenth-century Mexico, for example, at least one clandestine confraternity of African-descended women who appear in the historical record called themselves the religiosas (nuns) of Iphigenia.5 Although the church’s active participation in chattel slavery, colonization, and racial apartheid in the Americas and Africa kept the global black sister population low and statistically insignificant through much of the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls of black African descent embraced the religious state in the modern era. In Latin America, where St. Iphigenia was widely venerated, hundreds of African-descended women and girls entered religious life during the colonial era alone. However, admission restrictions based on blood purity, race, and color relegated black sisters to the lowest rank in their [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of the University of New Mexico Press communities with rare exceptions.6 Most were permitted only to serve as donadas (religious servants who took vows and wore veils) and restricted to domestic and menial labor in their orders regardless of their status, education, and spiritual perfection. 7 Although church records are inundated with direct and fleeting references to African-descended donadas...

Another Long Civil Rights Movement: How Catholic Interracialists Used the Resources of their Faith to Tear Down Racial Hierarchies

As African Americans moved to northern urban centers like Chicago starting in the 1910s, white Catholics often met them with hostility. But a contingent of black laypeople demanded that their church and fellow Catholics embrace the universality of their faith. By the 1930s, these middle-class black Catholics recruited white lay Catholics to their cause and forged interracial partnerships that lasted through the 1960s. Together, these Catholic interracialists worked for what they called interracial justice, seeking equality within the Catholic Church’s institutions and in American education, housing, and employment. This article argues that their activism constituted another strand of the long civil rights movement, which began in the 1930s. While historians of the long movement have demonstrated the centrality of the labor/left coalition, they have not adequately accounted for religious actors supporting the black freedom struggle. Using sources from black and white lay people, as well as the more traditional institutional sources, the article also shifts the narrative of Catholic interracialism away from white priests and toward the laity, and argues that on issues of race, the continuities in American Catholicism before and after the Second Vatican Council are more significant than the differences.

“I Belong! And I’m Here to Stay!” u.s. Black Catholics’ Faith and Faithfulness

This study attends closely to the faith and experiences of black Catholics. Two major themes emerged from semi-structured interviews with fifteen black Catholics in a midwestern u.s. city: First, participants experience the Catholic church simultaneously as both a loving home and a significant source of suffering because of racism. Second, participants engage in forgiveness of racism, which involves working for racial transformation of church and society. The analysis suggests a need for corporate conversion in that racism remains a major and pernicious barrier to the u.s. Catholic church’s ability to serve as a sacrament of God’s love.

Catholic Social Teaching, Vatican II, and Civil Rights: A Social Justice Trinity in the Fight to Save a Central Louisiana Black Catholic School

On March 23, 1971, the pastor of St. James Memorial Catholic Church in Alexandria, Louisiana conceded in a letter to Alexandria’s bishop, Charles P. Greco, that his congregation’s segregated black school would permanently close at the end of the school year. The planned closure brought heartache for all immediate stakeholders—clergy, religious sisters, and especially the lay faithful of the church. Less than one month later the congregation’s parish council presented Greco with a plan they argued could save the school from closure. The council’s attempt to thwart the closure provides an interesting local history case study that illuminates how black Catholics in the South during the period following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) utilized the language and emphases of Vatican II, Black Power and civil rights, and the Church’s commitment to education and social justice in an effort to maintain the availability of Catholic education in their community.

Beyond Parish Boundaries: Black Catholics and the Quest for Racial Justice

Abstract According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.