Troubles they've seen:
Levine, Al
REPORT FROM WASHINGTON TROUBLES THEY'VE SEEN AFRICAN-AMERICAN CATHOLICS George Murry, a Jesuit priest who is president of Carroll High School in Washington, D.C., formerly ran a parish in...
...Its African-American congregation is large, and, according to East, quite satisfied...
...It always gets worse before it gets better...
...He deeply loves his people so much that he wants us to be united...
...As the old African-American song goes: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...
...Others decried the closing of church schools, and declared that black children were being short-changed...
...After a pause, he added: "But you'll do...
...The church that we love we fail, if we do not try to transform it...
...God understands," he said, "that within our hearts there is love and hate, good and evil, hate and innocence...
...Behind us was Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church...
...Charles Murry, the Jesuit, summed it up for me this way: "Some of us are real outsiders fighting to get in...
...Augustine's in Washington in August, an informal poll disclosed similar ambivalences...
...They took funerals and baptisms in turn...
...But nobody wants to see and admit to racism in the church...
...When Murry walked into one funeral, all the relatives moved to the other side of the room and stared...
...He told me that he survived the seminary- where his attitude was considered too black and where he was told he was too backward to graduate-only because he refused to abandon his blackness...
...cop who had been killed by a drug trafficker...
...Teresa of Avila parish in southeast Washington...
...We are in love with a vision of the church that speaks about spirituality as a transformative force that will make us and the world different," Brother Cyprian Rowe had told the gathering at St...
...If that is not what we mean, then we too are in sin, because the bishops said that racism is sin...
...As a Jewish-American Catholic, this fact intrigued me...
...East then talked sadly, but without rancor, about how George Stallings's Imani Temple has cut the number of his parishioners in half...
...On a ride through the neighborhood, people driving past on a cross-street honked their horns, smiled, and waved to East...
...Picking up drugs," East commented...
...East told me that he saw the church as "neither the whore of Babylon nor a superchurch...
...that the herald will be the one whose voice has so often been discounted...
...At a forum for African-American Catholics at St...
...Payne knows how hard it can be to overcome these dualisms...
...Augustine's...
...That is what we mean when we say yes to the church...
...One participant said that there should be at least one black priest in every black parish, but then went on to say that "it's not a race problem" and that the "church should involve both blacks and whites...
...It concluded that the church is satisfactory and no changes need be made...
...One person wanted to know "how many of us are brainwashed so that we think we need permission to be, do, or think...
...But she ended our conversation by telling me that black people love the church-for its "hospitality," its global unity, its ritual structure...
...Finally, the brother of the deceased walked up to Murry and said: "We were expecting a white priest...
...She spoke of white priests in Chicago "who are blacker than the blackest person ever born," but also pointed to anti-black hostility everywhere...
...Four robberies and two murders had taken place within a few blocks of the rectory that week...
...that the church is racist and in need of great change...
...She recounted the judgment of a white South African priest who found Chicago more racist than his homeland...
...has increased by a million in the past decade...
...She excoriated the ignorance of some white Catholics: "They have a fear of approaching black persons and don't realize that they are a people with a culture, with a heritage...
...Later, as East and I passed a set of row houses, we noticed a young white man getting into an expensive double-parked car with Virginia plates...
...If you're looking for a bad experience, go to the Jewish...
...It is not uncommon for African-American Catholics to feel bitter reproaches within their own church...
...She feels the church is going through an identity crisis...
...The Jewish are treacherous...
...And Jacqueline Wilson, director of the Office of Black Catholics for the Archdiocese of Washington, told me how she had been complimented effusively by a white colleague "for being able to read well out loud...
...Others think the church is making progress...
...This experience made me want to listen to black Catholics' stories...
...REPORT FROM WASHINGTON TROUBLES THEY'VE SEEN AFRICAN-AMERICAN CATHOLICS George Murry, a Jesuit priest who is president of Carroll High School in Washington, D.C., formerly ran a parish in California with two other priests-an Irish-American and a Mexican-American...
...Three months after my baptism I was on retreat at a monastery when I overheard the prior say after the evening meal: "It's those Jewish...
...AL levine Al Levine is a free-lance writer living in Washington, D.C.ashington, D.C...
...East had just come from presiding at the funeral of a black D.C...
...Augustine's Church in Washington...
...Cynthia Norris, head of the Office of Black Catholics for the Archdiocese of Chicago, told me things are getting better for African-American Catholics because they are getting worse...
...I was reminded of what Bishop John Ricard had told me when I visited a neighborhood with him in northeast Baltimore: that next to the government, the church in Baltimore is the largest single provider of social services...
...Still others say, 'We're in, but we're not yet there.'" I visited Ray East, who succeeded George Stallings as pastor of St...
...But it is a herald and a healer...
...And then no longer will we hear anyone say: "As soon as we finished renovating the church and the school, the archdiocese sold them...
...You can't trust them...
...John Payne, an Augustinian friar soon to be ordained to the priesthood, recently preached the homily at St...
...It may be that when it comes to the church in the United States, the healer will prove to be the one who so often has been hurt...
...They're coming to a head," she said...
...Yet the number of black Catholics in the U.S...
...We drove to the top of a hill overlooking the Potomac, the Capitol, and the Washington Monument...
...that the church has "a strong African history but it's never expressed...
...He showed me a housing project where people have been gunned down by drug dealers...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
