Systemic racism is woven into the fabric of almost all of society’s institutions, like individual strands of hair woven into a thick braid. The Catholic Church is no exemption. Systemic racism, while related, operates independently from the person-to-person racism that receives the lion’s share of attention in society. In order to contextualize later chapters on St. Peter Claver, Philadelphia’s first parish for Black Catholics, liturgy as a form of identity work, and how Black Catholics experience race and space within the church, we must delineate the sociological nuances of the long-standing oppression of African Americans in the Catholic Church and recognize racism’s impact on our liturgical expression, the closing of churches, and parish reorganizations. To fully understand the African American Catholic experience, including our long history within the church, we must understand, sociologically, the role the U.S. Catholic Church has played in systemic racism against African Americans, from its institutions to its parishes and its scholarship. This chapter is not intended to serve as a work of history. Rather, it is a sociological grounding of systemic racism in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Since the earliest days of my career, even going back to before I finished graduate school, I have encountered incredulousness at the idea that there is such a thing as Black Catholics. I have encountered downright disbelief that African Catholics and Catholics of African descent have existed since the church’s earliest days. An urgent need I have with my book, Black and Catholic, is to dispel such myths once and for all. These myths persist despite Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB providing detail on the history of the church in Africa in the seminal The History of Black Catholics in the United States. Therefore, it is necessary to reiterate that African Catholics date back to the church’s earliest days, include Catholicism’s most revered thinkers and writers, and are (at the very least) the spiritual ancestors of Catholics of African descent around the world.
The Roman Catholic Church’s presence on the African continent dates back to the church’s earliest days. St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most well-known and revered figures in the church, was born in the mid-fourth century in present-day Algeria. Around that same time, St. Frumentius was ordained as the first bishop for Ethiopia by St. Athanasius, who himself was patriarch of Alexandria and born there at the end of the third century. Blacks’ affiliation with the church in North America dates back to the early sixteenth century when Spanish settlers arrived with slaves in tow and intending to import more from Africa. The strongest roots of the Black Catholic presence in the United States date back to the seventeenth century. People of French-Caribbean descent, both enslaved and free, lived along the Louisiana Gulf Coast and in Maryland. Of course, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, most Blacks living in the South—as practicing Catholics or not—were enslaved. In post–Civil War and especially in post–World War II America, Blacks became the next wave of people, after Germans, the Irish, and Italians, to settle in the urban North in great numbers.
The U.S. Census Bureau, which does not collect data on religion, reports that as of July 2019, there are 43.98 million Blacks in the United States. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University (CARA) states that as of 2020 there were 72.4 million self-identified Catholics in the United States. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church, there are 3 million Black Catholics in the United States, including Black Americans whose ties to the United States go back centuries as well as recent immigrants and their families. The Pew Research Center reports that only 5 percent of U.S. born Blacks are Catholic. Given the number of Blacks and the number of Catholics, coupled with the scope and breadth of the U.S. Catholic Church, the number of Black Catholics is disproportionately low. Systemic racism is the reason the numbers do not add up. To understand this, we must sociologically understand how racism has evolved in the Catholic Church, beginning with understanding how European Catholics became white in the United States and the creation of national parishes.
The Assimilation of European Catholics Into Whiteness
By the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in the United States had a distinctly Anglo-American flavor, with Baltimore, Maryland, serving as its spiritual capital. There were 100,000 Catholics residing in the United States at the time. They mingled freely among Protestants and made concerted efforts to maintain religious anonymity by keeping their Catholicism from becoming a major component in their public, or civic, identity. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the immigrant church in the United States was first dominated by German and Irish people and later by Italian people. They arrived in the United States in great numbers and primarily settled in the United States’ major northeastern cities, eventually moving as far west as Chicago in the latter part of the century. In their new homes, German and Irish Catholics encountered Catholics of French and English descent whose ancestors arrived in North America 200 years earlier. Initially, the newcomers co-existed in an uneasy alliance with those ethnic groups long established in the United States. Yet they encountered resistance from the already established French and English communities who took great pains to practice a Catholicism that did not distinguish them from their Protestant counterparts. The newcomers were distinctive in a variety of ways: immigrant status, rural origins, socioeconomic background, confinement to urban ghettos, and cultural expression. By their sheer numbers, unconcealable poverty, and unfamiliarity with the urban life they had been thrust into, 19th-century German and Irish Catholics could not go unnoticed like their predecessors. The more obvious distinctions between new immigrant Catholics and their more established counterparts distinguished them as “the other” and contributed to their classification as a separate race.
Theologian Maureen H. O’Connell breaks open this point in her book, Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness, where she places her own family’s narrative in the larger context of systemic racism in the U.S. Catholic Church. O’Connell examines her family narrative vis-à-vis the U.S. Catholic landscape, deftly illustrating how individuals’ actions contributed to, perpetuated, and benefited from the racism that sought to systemically marginalize Blacks. O’Connell shows how her Irish ancestors and other Irish immigrants around them, orchestrated and engaged in systemic anti-Blackness when they chose to racialize Blackness as a societal ill.
In discussing one of her ancestors, O’Connell states, “[Maurice Connell] carried with him an acute sense of what it felt like to be considered inferior and economically dependent. Irish were typically stereotyped as lazy, intellectually and morally deficient.” She goes on to point out that her ancestor “would have noticed that Irish arriving in Philadelphia with him not only seemed to despise Black people but also wanted their jobs and homes.” She asserts that “Irish Catholics in antebellum Philadelphia took Black jobs and pushed freed Black people out of the neighborhoods to which they had been relegated.” O’Connell points out that her ancestor received conflicting messages. He had clear messages from an Irish man whom he revered that his integrity would be questioned if he did not advocate for the emancipation of and liberty for people. On the other hand, he heard from some Catholic leaders that strident abolition and even the emancipation of enslaved Black people could further fracture the Union and therefore jeopardize the future he had left Lisgoold in search of. O’Connell states that hearing these conflicting messages, her ancestor took the path of anti-Blackness. It posed less risk and promised more rewards.
O’Connell clarifies that Irish immigrants in this period opted to racialize themselves as white to take advantage of the benefits of whiteness established by earlier white Europeans. They accepted the risk of opting to align themselves with whiteness and the power that would come with acceptance into its structures, even though it would mean enduring discrimination that would last for their and their children’s lifetimes at a minimum. In doing so, they opted not to align themselves with Blacks in pursuit of mutual liberation. This is yet another way that whiteness protects itself—by showing certain newcomers the benefits of whiteness and a path from the margins to the center at the price of the continued marginalization or “othering” of another, often more oppressed, community. Irish Catholics and other Europeans were literally becoming white at Black folks’ expense.
The Evolution of National Catholic Parishes
Immigrants new to the United States during the middle decades of the 19th century, having arrived mainly from rural areas, also felt dwarfed by the enormity and complexity of American cities. Consequently, they established an intense connection with the Catholic Church since it was, usually, the only institution they recognized. These divergent groups were determined to have their worship experience serve as a distinct cultural expression. Inevitably, these various groups would come into conflict with each other as they intermingled in a church trying to accommodate the needs of all its members. Germans could not understand services conducted in English, and the Irish could not grasp the subtleties of French-American priests’ homilies. Ethnic diversity and conflict intensified with each new wave of immigration.
Immigrants in the United States began to petition their local bishop—or the Vatican itself, if necessary—for parishes with priests from their country of origin. Immigrant Catholics wanted churches and parishes that looked like their worship spaces back home and centered around their particular ethnic needs. These national parishes, which grew over time, reflected the intimate connections between national identity and ethnic identity and served as vehicles for preserving and perpetuating their own culture.
At their height, national parishes flourished because of support from the institutional church embodied in the local bishop, but there are indications that support for European ethnic parishes was far from widespread. James Quigley, Chicago’s second archbishop from 1903–1915, understood the fine line between preserving ethnicity and fostering assimilation. He “cautiously encouraged Americanization while courageously defending ethnic rights.” He saw the ethnic communities as road stops on the journey toward full participation in U.S. life. During his episcopate, which began in 1903, Archbishop Quigley supported existing national parishes and opened many more, including twenty new Italian parishes by the time of his death in 1915. Italians did not fare as well in other major U.S. cities during the 19th century. For example, in New York, Italians existed on the fringes of the Catholic community. New York’s Archbishop John Hughes did not share the vision of Chicago’s Archbishop Quigley of ethnic parishes serving as a vehicle for Americanization. Unless the group in question was New York’s Irish community, Hughes was indifferent to the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as how preserving those bonds could benefit the church.
As the Irish and German Catholics had encountered hostility in the church of the early to mid-nineteenth century, they in turn created hostility for Italian and Black Catholics arriving in the United States’ major northern cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since they were unwelcome in established ethnic parishes, Italians wanted their own parishes to maintain their cultural heritage and their affection for their homeland. Institutional church support for Italian national parishes signaled the church’s acknowledgment of Italians’ potential to contribute to the growth of the church in the United States and the Italians’ move inward from the fringes of the U.S. Catholic community. Thus, national parishes did more than provide a site for worship. They served as an incubator for the creation of a distinctly U.S. Catholic culture. Additionally, they helped maintain an identity that remained rooted in white ethnic group’s European homelands. All of this happened in the midst of immigrant communities’ transition from the racialized “other” to ethnicity-based whiteness within a nearly all-Catholic environment that has been referred to as a “state-within-a-state” atmosphere. These parishes helped their members both to embrace Americanization and to maintain affection for their country of origin. This affection remained deep and intense for many years. For example, in the mid to late nineteenth century, one could not have an affinity for and a desire to preserve German culture if one did not have direct ties to Germany. This affinity for German culture waned after the two World Wars. The national bonds with Germany and Italy weakened, and this had severe ramifications for the continued viability of national parishes. Having gone from being German and Italian Catholics living in the United States to German American and Italian American Catholics, these ethnic groups did not want such an intense affiliation with countries the United States defeated in war.
National parishes’ simultaneous religious and ethnic expression created an emulsified ethno-religious identity that made it nearly impossible for these Catholics to distinguish their religious expression from their ethnic expression. Catholics of white ethnic groups created an identity that intertwined religion and ethnicity so completely that the two were indistinguishable. They engaged in religious identity formation yet failed to acknowledge they were engaging in such a process. Instead of seeing their culture production and identity formation as a combination of ethnicity, religion, and whiteness, they only saw it as being Catholic. As a result, when Black Catholics began to create a similarly emulsified identity decades later, white ethnic Catholics spurned the nascent expression of Black Catholics’ ethno-religious identity grounded in Blackness as being too authentically Black and, therefore, not truly Catholic. In reality, Black Catholics were creating an identity that co-mingled Catholicism with racial and ethnic expression in such a way as to be authentically Black and truly Catholic. As sociologist Korie Little Edwards points out, “religious space is not just about practicing one’s religion; it is also about living out one’s ethno-racial identity. People do not quite realize how much of their religious practice is also a way of doing ethnicity—until they have to share their religious space with people who do not share their ethno-racial identity.” In the case of white Catholics, their ethnicity, whiteness, or (depending on the group and the time) aspirational whiteness, and religion were so profoundly intertwined that they could not, or would not, see that Black Catholics were engaging in a similar process of identity formation that extolled ethno-racial identity and expression while remaining deeply rooted in Catholicism. White Catholics only saw Blackness as a threat to their burgeoning acceptance in broader U.S. society. Their response, like Catholic slaveholders before them, was anti-Blackness as “a form of racism, informed by white supremacist ideologies, centered on the particular devaluation and exploitation of Black persons,” one that is “embedded in institutions, organizations, cultures, and so on.”
Throughout Catholicism’s history in the United States, dating back to the seventeenth century even before the nation was formed, its Catholic white ethnic groups traversed strikingly similar paths. They began by holding steadfastly to the culture they brought from their country of origin. Eventually, they assimilated into Irish U.S. Catholicism, the dominant form since the nineteenth century. Variations on the assimilationist model produced Catholic parishes that were eerily similar in terms of pastoral work, evangelization, homiletics, and liturgical styles. Divergent explanations exist concerning the distinguishing features and goals of national parishes. One explanation has the emergence of this model of parish life rooted in shared language, not geography, since national parish boundaries often overlapped. On the other hand, geography may have been the distinguishing feature of national parishes since newly arrived immigrants tended to cluster in one area. The overlapping of geographic parish boundaries came later as social mobility took immigrants and their descendants out of their ethnic enclaves, which in turn made room for new waves of immigration. While new immigrants clung relentlessly to an overt sense of nominal and cultural Catholicism, priests at the newly formed national parishes found them grossly uninformed about the intricacies of the tradition. In some locales, particularly New York, national parishes worked to preserve the faith and create a cohesive Catholic community. Chicago’s national parishes worked to perpetuate ethnic identity past the immigrant generation while fostering Americanization. Since the church was often the only institution in the United States familiar to these newcomers, it also served as a privileged place for acclimating immigrants to other aspects of American life. The church’s support of various fraternal organizations and societies provided parishioners with job training, employment services, and educational opportunities, which fostered assimilation and upward social mobility. As successive generations be came further ingrained in American society, the need for weekly Mass in the same style as in the country of origin waned.
Ultimately, the decline of national parishes among the immigrant populations they served directly correlates with their success at meeting their assimilationist goals—goals that the church did not extend to African Americans. African Americans were not allowed to assimilate into religious and other social institutions. The job training and educational programs available at national parishes helped parishioners become upwardly mobile and move out of poverty, yet these programs fostering upward mobility were not made available to Black Catholics. Black Catholics struggled just to have parishes. So, due to anti-Blackness, Black Catholics did not have parish-based anti-poverty programs. The upward mobility white ethnic groups experienced was most notably signaled by national parish constituents moving out of the traditional neighborhoods and eventually marrying people from other ethnic groups. With intermarriage, those who were once seen as separate and distinct racial and ethnic groups easily identified as “the other” became collectively classified as white. This restructuring of American ethno-racial dynamics became evident as formerly disparate cultures were blended through marriage and family life. When distinct cultures are brought together, elements of each get lost. As families moved beyond the immigrant generation, language was one of the first elements of culture to fall by the wayside. As the dominance of national parishes among white ethnic groups faded in the post–World War II United States, the notion of “the other,” especially in the urban North, was redefined when the racialized language and systemic othering that white ethnic groups had reserved for each other would be used for Blacks. The consequences of this process for both the group in power and the group classified as “the other” are still being felt in the U.S. Catholic Church today.
How the Church Made Sure Black Catholics Stayed Black
Slavery is at the very beginning of Catholicism’s story in what is now the United States. In 1536, three Spanish explorers traveled across what is now the southern United States. The fourth member of the group was Esteban, a slave who was born in Morocco. Historian, Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB, describes Esteban thusly: “For us, he is a reminder that the first black man to traverse what is now the territory of the United States was Spanish-speaking and a Catholic.” Additionally, Esteban is the origin story of Catholicism’s anti-Blackness and intimate connection with chattel slavery in the United States. Internalizing anti-Blackness was a way for the Catholics to, over time, move away from the margins of U.S. society. Even after abolition, successor forms of anti-Blackness allowed Catholics from white ethnic groups to take on the benefits of whiteness.
Many Black Catholics who migrated to the urban North came to the church indirectly via slavery. Many Black Catholics (or, depending on the year, their immediate ancestors) had already experienced anti- Blackness by the Catholic Church in its harshest form. Adopting prevailing societal norms, like slaveholding, was just one way the nascent church in the United States sought to move away from the margins of society to the center. The Catholic Church in the United States acquiesced to the times in an effort to fit into the larger society. Individuals within the church hierarchy—such as Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, Bishop Richard Kendrick of St. Louis, Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget of Bardstown and Louisville, and Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston—owned slaves. Others, such as Bishop Francis Kendrick (the brother of Richard Kendrick), extolled slavery a year before becoming Bishop of Philadelphia in 1842. Kendrick stated that “nothing should be attempted against the laws nor anything be done or said that would make them [slaves] bear their yoke unwillingly.” Catholic slaveholders used the sacraments, particularly Baptism, as a means to justify slavery. By foisting Baptism onto slaves, Catholic slaveholders were able to bring more bodies into the church—bodies that they controlled. In doing so, Catholic slaveholders did not have to recognize those bodies as people, let alone as their brothers and sisters in Christ. This would have subsequent ramifications for Blacks wishing to enter the priesthood or religious life.
Religious congregations, including the Jesuits and Sulpicians in Maryland and Jesuits and Vincentians in Missouri, owned slaves in large numbers. Others, including the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit, expressly forbade Blacks from entering their orders for many years. St. Katharine Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891 to minister to African Americans and Native Americans. In 1893, members of the congregation, under St. Katharine Drexel’s leadership, voted not to admit Black and Native American women. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament only reversed course in 1949 under pressure from white priests. Operating on a similar timeline, the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit were founded in Holland in 1889. They began working in the United States in 1901 with a focus on ministry in the African American community yet did not begin admitting Blacks until 1946.
In 1838, the Jesuits sold the 272 slaves held in Maryland en masse to financially stabilize Georgetown University as well as other institutions along the East Coast. In addition to their financial incentive, the Jesuits realized they were ineffective farmers. They were also beginning to realize that if Catholicism was really going to become a force in the United States, it was going to happen in cities, specifically in the cities where German and Irish immigrants were making their homes. The church was the only institution familiar to these immigrants. The 1838 sale allowed the Jesuits to not only financially fortify Georgetown University but also divest from unproductive farming operations and reallocate resources in urban ministries directed at German and Irish immigrants. Because of these financial and societal pressures, the church deliberately chose white immigrants at the equally deliberate expense of evangelizing African Americans.
Georgetown University owes its continued existence to the financial largess provided by the 1838 sale. Even though there was already academic literature on Jesuit slaveholding (much of it written by Jesuits), Georgetown’s public reckoning with this history began after a series of articles published by The New York Times, starting in 2016. As part of the ongoing reckoning with this history, Georgetown now offers preferential or legacy admissions to the documented descendants of any slaves held by the Jesuit Community in Maryland, not just the 272 sold in 1838. On the surface, this sounds like a legitimate act of reparation to those whose ancestors secured Georgetown’s financial solvency through their slave labor. According to Georgetown’s website, one must provide or obtain documentation of descendancy, yet it is extremely difficult to document those family connections. This presents a major obstacle to accessing legacy admission. An institution puts its money behind what it values. Georgetown has not valued any of the slaves whose labor fortified it, including the aforementioned 272 men, women, and children. As a way of rectifying this, over the last few years, multiple descendants’ organizations and memory projects have been founded to preserve this history and hold Georgetown and the Jesuits accountable.
Records related to the Jesuits’ 1838 slave sale indicate that a portion of the money raised from the sale was also used to support Old St. Joseph’s Church in Philadelphia. Old St. Joe’s, as the parish is known, was the first site of St. Joseph’s University. Without Old St. Joe’s, there would be no Saint Joseph’s University. I was a contingent faculty member at Saint Joseph’s University from January 2010 through the summer of 2018. Currently, Saint Joseph’s University is located in Wynnefield, a predominantly African American section of Philadelphia. In the fall of 2016, I spoke at a panel at Saint Joseph’s University held on Jesuit slaveholding. I pointed out that according to information available on the university’s website, as of fall 2015, only 3.8 percent of traditional-age students were African American. Less than 14 percent of traditional-age students were people of color. In addition, as of fall 2013 (the most recent data that was available to me), there were 656 full-time faculty members at SJU. I cannot say how many are people of color because that information is not publicly available; however, I can tell you that I could have counted the number of African American full-time faculty on my fingers. These realities of the minuscule numbers of African American students and faculty do not exist in a vacuum.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Black and Catholic: Racism, Identity, and Religion. It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
