Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871--1960

By Stephen J. Ochs

Book Overview

Historically, black Americans have affiliated in far greater numbers with certain protestant denominations than with the Roman Catholic church. In analyzing this phenomenon scholars have sometimes alluded to the dearth of black Catholic priest, but non one has adequately explained why the church failed to ordain significant numbers of black clergy until the 1930s. Desegregating the Altar, a broadly based study encompassing Afro-American, Roman catholic, southern, and institutional history, fills that gap by examining the issue through the experience of St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, or the Josephites, the only American community of Catholic priests devoted exclusively to evangelization of blacks. Drawing on extensive research in the previously closed or unavailable archives of numerous archdioceses, diocese, and religious communities, Stephen J. Ochs shows that, in many cases, Roman catholic authorities purposely excluded Afro-Americans from their seminaries. The conscious pattern of discrimination on the part of numerous bishops and heads of religious institutes stemmed from a number of factors, including the church's weak and vulnerable position in the South and the consequent reluctance of its leaders to challenge local racial norms; the tendency of Roman Catholics to accommodate to the regional and national cultures in which they lived; deep-seated psychosexual fears that black men would be unable to maintain celibacy as priests; and a "missionary approach" to blacks that regarded them as passive children rather than as potential partners and leaders. The Josephites, under the leadership of John R. Slattery, their first superior general (1893-1903), defied prevailing racist sentiment by admitting blacks into their college and seminary and raising three of them to the priesthood between 1891 and 1907. This action proved so explosive, however, that it helped drive Slattery out of the church and nearly destroyed the Josephite community. In the face of such opposition, Josephite authorities closed their college and seminary to black candidates except for an occasional mulatto. Leadership in the development of a black clergy thereupon passed to missionaries of the Society of the Diving Word. Meanwhile, Afro-American Catholics, led by Professor Thomas Wyatt, refused to allow the Josephites to abandon the filed quietly. They formed the Federated Colored Catholics of America and pressed the Josephites to return to their earlier policies; they also communicated their grievances to the Holy See, which, in turn, quietly pressured the American church to open its seminaries to black candidates. As a result, by 1960, the number of black priests and seminarians in the Josephites and throughout the Catholic church in the United States had increased significantly. Stephen Ochs's study of the Josephites illustrates the tenacity and insidiousness of institutional racism and the tendency of churches to opt for institutional security rather than a prophetic stance in the face of controversial social issues. His book ably demonstrates that the struggle of black Catholics for priests of their own race mirrored the efforts of Afro-Americans throughout American society to achieve racial equality and justice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807118591
• ISBN13: 9780807118597
• Release Date: July 1993
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Road to the priesthood for early black candidates

Excellent book to study the emergence of Black priest in America.

A MARVELOUS TREATMENT OF AN OVERLOOKED ASPECT OF BLACK HISTORY

In this book, Stephen Ochs has given a wonderfully informative history of an important aspect of African-American religious history: the struggle between 1871-1960 to include black priests in the Catholic Church. Ochs begins by noting (using 1988 figures) that there are thirteen Afro-American Roman Catholic bishops, with three hundred priests, and 1.5 million black Catholics in this country (about 2% of the total). However, the struggle to reach this position began with the experiences of St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, known as the "Josephites," who were "the lone Roman Catholic clerical society of priests and brothers devoted exclusively to ministry in the Afro-American community." Ochs notes that "Before the arrival of the Mill Hill Fathers, the church had basically failed in its mission to Afro-Americans. Successive waves of Catholic European immigration throughout the nineteenth century had taxed church resources to the limit and left few priests and sisters available for work among blacks." The first black priests in this country were three brothers, who were all born slaves in the 1830s to an Irishman named Michael Morris Healy, who had ten children in a monogamous relationship with one of his black slaves named Mary Eliza (it would have been illegal for them to have married, of course). Their oldest son, James Augustine Healy, was ordained for the diocese of Boston, and eventually was made the second bishop of Portland, Maine. Unfortunately, "Healy identified more with his Irish heritage and his French training than with his Afro-American background." Later, "On December 19, 1891, the six-foot-two-inch tall seminarian (Charles Uncles) became the first black man ordained in the United States." Ochs covers many areas of fact, such as that Xavier University in New Orleans is "America's only Catholic black university." He also notes that some of the friends of the movement for black priests weren't black themselves: "During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the cause of black priests in the Catholic Church had no greater champion than the Reverend John R. Slattery." Ochs also takes note of some intra-group squabbles, such as "the feud between the Josephites and the Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics," and the later "rupture in the Federated Colored Catholics." This is a fascinating and much-needed book that will be ESSENTIAL READING for Catholics, black Catholics, anyone interested in African-American religion, or African-American studies in general.