Preaching the word & doing it:

...Exposed to the pervasive and often mandatory religion classes of the schools and to the personal concern evidenced by the nuns and priests, black Protestant children, and in some cases their parents, joined the church...

...Historically, black lay leaders instinctively recognized the importance of organization on both the local and the national level-locally for effective action and nationally for solidarity and empowerment...

...To white Catholics they enumerated incidents of discrimination within the church and proclaimed that Catholicism and race prejudice were incompatible...

...Thus the first Christianity to be adopted by the ancestors of African-Americans was not Protestantism but Catholicism...

...Spirituals, gospel music, emotionally expressive styles of worship, chanted preaching-what did these have to do with Roman Catholicism...

...As a predominantly southern and rural black populace began to move increasingly to the cities of the North and the West after World War I, black Protestants came into contact-many of them for the first time-with Roman Catholics...

...Nevertheless, since such is the state of things, nothing should be attempted against the laws nor anything be done or said that would make them bear their yoke unwillingly...

...Tragically, that history was inextricably bound up with the brutality of oppression, enslavement, and discrimination-a system of evil to which the church accommodated...

...At their five (now six) national African-American Congresses, black Catholic delegates took up the issue of evangelization and significantly linked it to social action...

...From 2.3 percent black Catholics grew to 4 percent of the black population...

...Threatened by severe financial pressure, the future of many of these schools across the nation is now at risk...

...It is, therefore, incumbent upon the church, especially a church that prizes tradition as highly as does Roman Catholicism, to recover and preserve the history of her black members...

...The final lesson that I wish to draw from the black Catholic experience is a challenge to recapture this vision of social action as evangelization...

...Unless the church did what she preached, hypocrisy and resultant cynicism were ever present dangers to belief...

...Nowhere is the challenge more obvious and more difficult than in the situation of inner-city Catholic schools...

...When we adjust our perspective on the formation of the Atlantic World to include the South Atlantic, not just the North, we begin to realize that the Atlantic World-from its inception-involved black Catholics...

...The origins of African-American culture began in that historic confluence of peoples that started in the fifteenth century to create what became the Atlantic World...

...For the first time black Protestants met black Catholics who had migrated from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, traditional centers of black Catholic population...

...For them the two seemed as inseparable as word and deed...

...As they arrived, African-Americans replaced European immigrants in the urban ghettos and settled into blocks adjacent to them...

...Initially, the contact was none too friendly, as ethnic fears and economic rivalry aroused racial animosity between black migrants and Catholics of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrant backgrounds...

...Given the historic and current paucity of black clergy and black seminarians, however, the church also needs to recognize and encourage the exercise of leadership among the black laity...

...Not much of an inconvenience, but I could not help reflecting that such instances of negligence make black Catholics feel alien in their own church and encourage white Catholics to remain apathetic about one of the most important moral issues of our time...

...Will they choose, no doubt regretfully, to allow these schools to close...

...As late as 1861, the widely used moral theology textbook written by Francis Patrick Kenrick, bishop of Philadelphia and later archbishop of Baltimore, proclaimed: But what is to be thought of the domestic servitude which exists in most of the southern and western states where the posterity of those who were brought from Africa still remain in slavery...

...It is indeed to be regretted that in the present fullness of liberty in which all glory there should be so many slaves, and that to guard against their movement it has been necessary to pass laws prohibiting their education and in some places greatly restricting their exercise of religion...

...Twenty years after the Kerner Commission Report, the gap between "two separate and unequal nations" has become for some an abyss...

...The Catholic school has been one of the primary points of contact between the Catholic church and black communities in twentieth-century America...

...Their decisions will speak volumes to black Americans...

...Black Americans are not strangers to Catholicism...

...The church needs to arouse the consciences of Catholics about the crises of the inner cities and to devote institutional efforts on the local and national levels to deal with this legacy of racism...

...However this may be, the number of black Catholics increased dramatically due to conversion...

...Black Americans wonder why this situation does not stir more moral outrage among Catholics who claim to be concerned about the sanctity of human life...

...but when a white majority in the church shall for social purposes abandon this Banner, we shall certainly not be misled...

...Between 1940 and 1975, the black Catholic population grew from 296,988 to 916,854, an increase of 208 percent...

...Moreover, black Catholics in the U.S...

...PREACHING THE WORD & DOING IT BLACK CATHOLICS IN AMERICA ALBERT RABOTEAU There is a common tendency among Americans, black and white, even among those who should know better, to think of black Catholics as an anomaly...

...My point is not simply to condemn this particular example of the church's alliance with oppressive systems of power, but to point out that toleration of such evil ineluctably carries long-lasting historic residues...

...By the time of Columbus's voyages, contact between Portuguese Catholics and West Africans was extensive...

...In addition, the minority status of black Catholics contributed to their invisibility to historians...

...Africans outnumbered Europeans in the population of colonies like Cuba and Haiti...

...Without black men and women in positions of real authority within the church, blacks will continue, for the foreseeable future, to appear as wards of a white-run institution...

...to develop a black clergy constituted the greatest single obstacle to the identification of African-Americans with Roman Catholicism...

...To black Protestants they asserted their belief that the Roman Catholic church alone preserved the universalism of the Gospel...

...The history of Roman Catholicism among African-Americans stretches back to the beginnings of the Atlantic world in which America itself was formed...

...It is easy to discern and condemn outright acts and blatant expressions of prejudice, much more difficult to discern sins of omission and benign neglect...

...Irrespective of conversion figures, however, Catholic schools, because of their emphasis on discipline, religion, and achievement, constituted one of the few sources of hope in black communities devastated by poverty and neglect...

...Turner, like his predecessors, condemned the presence of racism in the church, and stressed that discrimination, no matter the excuse, contradicted the Gospel...

...Black Catholic feelings of alienation from the church have been exacerbated by the lack of black priests...

...Just as the historic effects of the Reformation still confront us, so too the results of slavery continue to affect our institutions and relationships today...

...In the midst of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, they persisted in their belief and in so doing bore eloquent witness to the essence of the Gospel...

...Throughout the hemisphere, religious orders held slaves, including the Jesuits of colonial Maryland, who formed the first body of clergy for the church in the United States...

...Slaves be obedient to your masters, as you would to God," was a text frequently proclaimed by Catholic and Protestant clergy alike...

...For both groups, black lay leadership signals the universal character of the church in our time and place, a universality which embraces all races and cultures in building up the body of Christ...

...That is why attempts to temporize on issues of segregation and discrimination seemed so dangerous...

...If taken seriously, the history of their faith impels us to attend with renewed urgency and specificity to the profound challenge that Jesus placed before all his followers: "As long as you did it to the least of these, you did it unto me...

...As the church has acknowledged her responsibility for the religious brokenness of the Christian community, she must also admit and repent her responsibility for the racial brokenness that still cripples our society...

...Christianity was deformed by its acceptance of slavery...

...Black lay activism continued in the twentieth century with the organization in 1918 of the Federated Colored Catholics by Thomas Wyatt Turner, a professor of biology at Howard University and Hampton Institute...

...King was made, not in the homily or even in the prayers of the faithful...

...these, you did it unto me...

...Attacking segregation in seminaries, he remarked to a white priest in 1919: The Catholic colored people have tied themselves, in the church, up to the Banner of the Lord Jesus Christ, which we think we recognize quite clearly...

...it also symbolized the novelty of such a step...

...In 1491 the feudal lord of the Kongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, converted to Catholicism, taking the baptismal name of Joao I, and one of his grandsons was consecrated a bishop by Pope Leo X in 1516...

...The initial step toward the creation of that world began in the 1440s when Portuguese explorers and adventurers first came into contact with sub-Saharan Africans on the west coast of the land they called Guinea...

...Black Catholics have been invisible to historians of American Catholicism and to historians of African-Americans, because they assumed that being black meant being Protestant...

...To be sure, he had been preceded by the Healy brothers, James, Alexander, and Patrick, all ordained in Europe, at mid-century and by Augustus Tolton, ordained in Rome in 1886...

...And they have been valued as such by members of those communities, who, though Protestant, struggled to send their children to parochial schools in order to get them a good education and a chance for a better life...

...The first lesson to be drawn from my rapid survey is this: the recovery of their origins, and their subsequent history as well, is of crucial importance to black Catholic identity, to their sense of being truly black and authentically Catholic...

...Disappointed and angered, my family and I went to the local black Presbyterian church, in order to recall and rededicate ourselves to King's nonviolent struggle for racial justice...

...In fact, however, there is nothing anomalous about the identification of African-Americans with Roman Catholicism, nor have black Catholics been marginal to the history of America...

...If all the white priests and laymen decide that segregating and discriminating Catholics are reasonable in the Catholic church, we shall still cling to the undefiled Banner of the Lord, even though we may have to tread the "winepress alone...

...As time went on, the parochial school, which offered urban blacks an appealing alternative to public education, became an important source of black converts...

...After all, has not the broad mainstream of African-American culture been overwhelmingly Protestant...

...at the same time they spoke of the need to evangelize the black community...

...The failure of Catholicism in the U.S...

...Africans accompanied the first Spanish expeditions to invade the Americas and soon formed the bulk of the labor force used to exploit the lands seized by Spanish, Portuguese, and French Catholics in the Caribbean and Brazil...

...Five African-American Catholic Congresses met between 1889 and 1894, representing black Catholics from around the country...

...all along they have claimed it as their own...

...The second lesson, I would draw then from the history of African-Americans, is that the church needs to be especially sensitive to ongoing issues of domination and discrimination, particularly in their more subtle institutional forms...

...are historically linked to these early African-American Catholics through Louisiana and Baltimore, where Haitian emigres influenced the development of enduring black Catholic communities in the early nineteenth century...

...Indeed, black Catholics constituted a double minority: a racial minority among their fellow Catholics, they formed a religious minority in the black community...

...While a black Protestant clergy began to emerge in significant numbers by the end of the eighteenth century, it was not until the end of the nineteenth that the first black priest was ordained in the U.S.-Charles Randolph Uncles in Baltimore in 1891...

...Therefore, delegates to the Black Catholic Congresses in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries expressed concern about substandard housing for black Americans, unemployment in their communities, the denial of Catholic education to black youth...

...Religiously and racially they seemed marginal to the story...

...In the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and Washington, major magnets for black migration, it was usually the case that one or two Catholic churches remained in the changing neighborhoods to accommodate old parishioners and to convert newcomers...

...To cite one example: the first community of African-American religious, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, founded in Baltimore in 1829, was constituted by four young women of Haitian and Cuban origin...

...Tolton's fame in the black community symbolized the pride that African-Americans took in seeing one of their own elevated to the dignity of the priesthood...

...Tolton was the first to be assigned to minister to black Catholics, and was publicly acclaimed by African-Americans, Protestant as well as Catholic, as "our priest...

...In allying itself with the brutal exploitation of Africans and the racism that legitimated it, the church found herself in the position of proclaiming the Gospel as a device of slave control...

...As some social scientists have suggested, the desire for education and upward social mobility may have led some blacks to send their children to Catholic schools and to consider converting to Catholicism...

...When the Protestant Reformation erupted in the sixteenth century, black African priests were pastoring churches on the islands off the west coast of Africa...

...Current estimates place the figure at approximately 2 million...

...Well into the twentieth century many religious orders and diocesan seminaries routinely rejected black candidates...

...In the absence of black clergy, a strong tradition of lay leadership emerged among black Catholics in the late nineteenth century...

...It was in conscious continuity with these nineteenth-century Congresses that black Catholics organized a sixth African-American Catholic Congress, held in Washington, D.C., in 1987, from which the present pastoral plan derived...

...The statistical minority of black Catholics in North America seems less salient when we take account of the large populations of black Catholics in South America and the Caribbean...

...At these Congresses, lay delegates publicly articulated the meaning of their Catholic faith...

...Moreover, black lay leaders can be crucial role models for white as well as black Catholics...

...If I may offer an autobiographical example: last year, every church in my town commemorated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., except my own parish church where no mention of Dr...

...Today, the church recognizes the need for recruitment of black priests and religious...

...Precisely at a time when the epidemic of drug abuse, crime, and entrenched poverty spiral the black underclass to new depths of demoralization and despair, the church needs to preach by action, as well as by word...

...Will pastors and bishops continue to spend enormous resources upon the education of children who are predominantly non-Catholic...