A Southern pastor
Appleby, Scott
A Southern pastor he public career of Msgr. Joseph B. Gremillion, who died August 9 at the University of Notre Dame, was a microcosm of an extraordinary era in church history. A native of tiny...
...Gremillion's parochial concerns proved to be globally relevant...
...Pope Paul VI appointed him in 1967 to the Pontifical Commission on Peace and Justice...
...After taking a doctorate in social studies at the Gregorian University in Rome, in 1960 he became director for social development for Catholic Relief Services, working to promote social ministry, community development, and nutrition and health programs in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East...
...But influence can be measured in many ways...
...and persuaded lay Catholics to take responsibility for their parishes...
...in this posting he represented the papacy to bishops' conferences, national governments, and religious bodies in fifty countries...
...In 1974 he became adjunct professor at Notre Dame, where he later served as director of its Institute for Pastoral and Social Ministry, and as co-director, with David Leege, of the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life...
...Inspired by friends, teachers, and colleagues—including progressive priests such as John Egan, Luigi Ligutti, and George Higgins—he anticipated much of Vatican II in his efforts to empower lay leaders and turn the face of the local church outward...
...Gremillion cut his pastoral teeth on the problems of a Southern parish struggling with civil rights and nascent lay leadership in the 1950s...
...Gremillion's sense of ministry and church was profoundly shaped by his participation in reform movements like the Catholic Committee of the South and his experience at Grailville, the school for apostolic formation near Loveland, Ohio, which he valued for its "world vision" and its grasp of the potential of lay missionaries...
...Of Gremillion's books, his Journal of a Southern Pastor was an honest and detailed account of his years at Saint Joseph's...
...He worked to widen the awareness of lay groups such as the Holy Name Society on pressing social issues: racism, migrant workers, education without God, corrupt politics...
...Those who knew him found inspiration in his vision, even when it seemed unrealistic, precisely because it was so clearly a product of his frustrating and unfinished, but undeniably redemptive, ministry in an "ordinary" Southern parish...
...SCOTT appleby Scott Appleby is director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame...
...challenged social apathy and racism...
...the most influential has been The Gospel of Peace and Justice (Orbis, 1976), an annotated collection of church documents on social justice...
...From his base in Saint Joseph's parish in Shreveport, which he founded in 1947, he coaxed a Catholic minority in the Bible Belt to embrace ecumenism before it became fashionable...
...Father Joe" acted as a man of faith, possessed of a dramatic expectation for a coming global community of justice...
...A native of tiny Moreauville, Louisiana, he became in time an internationally respected pioneer of Catholic social ministry...
...To provide a "program for training" for lay action, he established Catholic Action groups and ambitious adult education programs...
...He pioneered also in accepting lay teachers for Catholic schools, and imbuing them with a sense of mission...
Vol. 121 • September 1994 • No. 16
