Raymond Rodly Caesar, SVD (14 February 1932 – 18 June 1987) was an American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as Bishop of Goroka in Papua New Guinea from 1980 until his death in 1987.
[1][2] He was the first African American to serve as a Catholic bishop outside of the United States.
Born in Eunice, Louisiana, to Celina Comeaux and Prosper Caesar,[3] Caesar was ordained to the priesthood for the Society of the Divine Word in 1961, during a period when African-American priests were still few and far-between.
The White Supremacist climate of the United States at the time dictated, for most Catholic ordinaries, that Black priests could not enter their seminaries or serve in their dioceses—which meant that the first prospective Black priests from the US were sent to study abroad.
Caesar was one such priest, who after his ordination in 1961 would go on to become a Monsignor as well as a bishop outside of the US (in Papua New Guinea), as the SVD order served diocese across the globe.