Black Catholicism
[5] Prior to the Second Vatican Council, Black Catholics attended Mass in Latin, as did the rest of the Western Church, and did not display much difference in terms of liturgy or spiritual patrimony.
[16] The Muslim takeover of Southern Spain (Al-Andalus) forced a significant Catholic community from there into North Africa, specifically Morocco; these individuals constituted the Mozarabic tradition.
[18] Roughly a century before Europe made contact with what would become the United States, the Portuguese entered the Kongo and began to make converts and engage in trade; there was also some limited slave-trading between the European power and their new African colleagues.
[20] Many of these victims would eventually be brought to the Americas, and some scholars have suggested their common cultural heritage and shared faith led them to instigate at least one major rebellion in the colonial United States.
During this period a number of Black Catholics would make a name for themselves, including Venerable Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-American born into slavery and brought to New York shortly after the founding of the United States.
[27] The Oblate Sisters of Providence were founded by Haitian-American nun Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange and Fr James Nicholas Joubert in 1828 in Baltimore, in a time when black women were not allowed to join existing orders (which were all-white) and were thought to be unworthy of the spiritual task.
[33] In 1857, French Catholic priest Claude Paschal Maistre obtained faculties from Archbishop of New Orleans Antoine Blanc to pastor the city's newly created interracial Francophone parish, St Rose of Lima.
The pastor promoted increasingly radical positions (including abolitionism), fueled by the much-publicized progressivism of French Catholic clergy in his homeland, President Lincoln, and local Afro-Creole activists.
When parishes in places like New Orleans began to transition from the French tradition of interracialism to the American habit of strict racial segregation, Creoles (who tended to descend from free people of color) often resisted the move so as not to lose their elevated status as the more privileged milieu of African-Americans.
A few months later, he celebrated a Mass championing Lincoln's edict, effectively ejecting his racist white parishioners and drawing death threats (including one from a fellow priest).
Maistre defied the order(s), officiating—among other services—the funeral of Black Catholic Union Army Cpt André Cailloux, defiantly attended by many of the priest's admirers.
[34] After Odin's death in 1870, New Orleans' next prelate, Napoléon Perché, restored Maistre's faculties, closed Holy Name of Jesus, and reassigned him to St. Lawrence (in relatively remote Terrebonne Parish).
Born a slave in Ralls County, he, his siblings and his mother found freedom in Illinois; he would later, with the help of supportive American bishops and Vatican officials, attend seminary and be ordained in Europe (not unlike the Healy brothers).
She converted to Catholicism in 1880, became a street evangelist and Secular Franciscan, and ministered to the poor for the rest of her life (always at night, to avoid embarrassing white people she served).
[46] From the period immediately preceding Emancipation, various Catholic missions organizations began to dedicate themselves to the task of converting and ministering to black Americans, who were then for the most part held in slavery.
[51] In the late 19th century, Black Catholics in New Orleans began to join with Whites and other activists to oppose segregation, with the Crescent City being one of the few American locales to have previously experienced a much more interracial climate (this being while under French and Spanish rule).
[61] During his time in Savannah, Lissner also helped found the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, in response to a Georgia law banning White teachers from teaching Black students.
Around the same time, blacks were beginning to migrate by the millions from the Jim Crow South to greener pastures north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Mississippi and the Rockies.
This, combined with a missionary impulse on the part of local white clerics and nuns, led to mass recruitment of black Protestants to these schools, and eventually the parishes as well.
In the South, the successes of the Divine Word society in ordaining black priests, as well as other propitious factors, led to the integration of other orders (an early example being the Benedictines in Collegeville, Minnesota in the 1940s) as well as a number of dioceses.
Diane Nash, a prominent lunch-counter demonstrator, Freedom Rider, voter registration advocate, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) co-founder, was also Catholic.
Eventually, as the movement entered full-swing, Catholics of all stripes would begin to participate, with white and black laypeople, priests, religious brothers, sisters, and nuns joining the fray—with some even becoming notable as such.
[8] The movement was headed off by the statement that came out of the inaugural NBCCC meeting in Detroit, in which the caucus members declared in the opening line that "the Catholic Church in the United States is primarily a white, racist institution.
"[8] At least two of the requests made in the statement were answered rather quickly, as—with the help of a white Josephite superior general who advocated for it as early as 1967—the permanent diaconate was restored in the United States in October 1968, and the National Office for Black Catholics (NOBC) was established in 1970.
[104] In 1991, the National Association of Black Catholic Deacons began operations, and that same year, Sr Jamie Phelps helped to restart the annual meetings of the BCTS.
[120] In 2015, the USCCB issued a series of documents in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement, including a "Black Catholic History Rosary" created by Dr. Kirk P.
[121] As part of the NBCC Congress XII proceedings in 2017, representatives appointed by bishops from every diocese in the United States issued a "Pastoral Plan of Action" meant to address the needs of Black Catholics nationwide.
Hayes, Copeland, Craig A Ford Jr., and Fr Bryan Massingale have been accused of magisterial dissent (especially on topics related to the LGBT community), and there is evidence of such in some of their writings.
[150] The Diocese of San Jose celebrates a similar liturgy at their cathedral during the city's annual jazz festival,[151] as does Vacaville's St. Mary's Catholic Church during theirs.
New York—the most populous US city—also has the most Black Catholics, followed (in no particular order) by Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Oakland, Baltimore, and the D.C. metro area.
