The Strange Career of New Orleans Catholicism

This chapter closely traces the history of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish from its founding in 1905 through its closing after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 as a window into the evolution of New Orleans Catholicism from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, with a particular focus on the evolving significance of race and the role of transnational identities. An analytical microhistory of Lourdes Parish in the context of the lengthy history of New Orleans Catholicism reveals that racism and racial identity divided New Orleans Catholics through segregation, desegregation, and integration, even as a common Catholic culture posited a shared religious identity that transcended racial divisions. Throughout the experience of Lourdes Parish, and arguably in New Orleans Catholicism more broadly in the twentieth century, the particularities of white supremacism and racial identity interacted in dynamic tension with the universalistic claims of a common Catholic culture embracing all believers even as the New Orleans Church belatedly Americanized from its Gallic roots. One product of this tension was the distinct black Catholic culture that emerged at black-majority Catholic parishes in the Crescent City as black Catholics struggled against racism in the Church.

Experiencing Uncommon Faithfulness:

The challenges confronting the church in the 21st century, especially that of persistent systemic racism, call for a methodological shift in ecclesiology. This paper explores the meaning and benefits of Natalia’s Imperatori-Lee’s narrative ecclesiology within the context of race in the United States Catholic Church. By turning to the story of God’s people, especially the silenced and oppressed, ecclesiology is empowered to challenge false histories and overturn theologies which justify oppression. Furthermore, the work of the Holy Spirit and the responses of the faithful are made evident in lives of “uncommon faithfulness,” such as those of Black Catholics in the US. To be guided by narrative ecclesiology today, members of the church must engage in an embodied struggle for liberation and so hear the story of God’s people anew.

Centering Black Catholic Religio-Racial Identity, Revealing White Catholicism

In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld presents numerous instances when members of religio-racial movements contested the racial classificatory system provided by the federal government and confronted state administrators with their own alternative religio-racial identities. For Weisenfeld, these sorts of exchanges highlight, first and foremost, Black agency in religio-race making. But, as she indicates, they also make visible the contours of religio-racial whiteness as state administrators struggled to defend the status quo. In this article, I focus on how Black contestation and confrontation with racial hierarchy can reveal the racial whiteness operating beneath the surface of normative “religion.” This article draws on sources ranging from a police surveillance report to angry letters from white Catholics in order to argue that Black Catholics interrupted the presumed normativity of white Catholic religious life and, in so doing, revealed white Catholicism as a racial formation.

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

Liturgy as Identity Work in Predominantly African American Parishes

The experiences of African American Catholics are grossly underrepresented in the sociological literature on both race and religion. This is due, in part, to the perception that being both Black and Catholic is a disparate identity. This chapter asserts that while the approximately three million Black Catholics in the U.S. are indeed a minority, their historically rich past and dynamic present make them an integral part of both American Catholicism and the African American religious experience. This chapter explores how Black Catholics in predominantly African American parishes use liturgy to actively combine their dual heritages in forming a distinct Black Catholic identity. Participant observation research identified three distinct styles of liturgy—Traditionalist, Spirited, and Gospel—that highlight the diversity of religious expression among African American Catholics while also heeding the mandate of the Black Bishops of the U.S. to be “authentically Black” and “truly Catholic.”

African American Catholics in the South and Desegregation, 1945–1970

Recollections from former students often present a positive appreciation of black Catholic schools primarily for their educational quality but also, in many cases, for their emphasis on self-worth and also, occasionally, on black culture and heritage. African American Catholics valued black schools and churches as religious and community institutions. Prelates generally sought to achieve desegregation by closing or downgrading black Catholic institutions. African American Catholics differed in their response. While some black Catholics reluctantly accepted such action as a necessary price for desegregation, others opposed these measures, upset by the one-sided nature of Catholic desegregation and inspired by the rise of black con consciousness in the second half of the 1960s. Some disillusioned African Americans, especially younger Catholics, left the church.

Desegregating Dixie

This book draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the multifaceted and complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining Africans Americans to the back of white churches and black schools and churches. However, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the mid-1940s, pressure from some black and white Catholics and secular change brought by the civil rights movement, sometimes with federal support, increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination behind and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South divided between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began segregation before or in anticipation of secular change, while elsewhere, and especially in the Deep South, they often tied Catholic to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than often assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation seldom brought integration.