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| Archbishop Joseph Rummel |
Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle is
remembered as an arch-conservative prelate because of the exceedingly harsh way
in which he suppressed dissent from Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae condemning artificial
contraception. But what is often
overlooked is that one of his first acts on becoming Archbishop of Washington
was to desegregate Church institutions in the Archdiocese. Washington and the surrounding Maryland
counties had a long tradition of racial segregation and O’Boyle’s acts preceded
the Supreme Court decision desegregating Public Schools, Brown vs. The Board of
Education, by six years.
The next story to consider is
Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans who face a showdown with
segregationists in Louisiana in the early ‘60’s. Joseph Rummel’s family immigrated from Baden
Germany when he was six years old and settled in New York City. He entered seminary as a high-schooler and,
after having done his theological studies in Rome, was ordained for the
Archdiocese of New York on May 24, 1902.
From 1928 until 1935 he served as Bishop of Omaha and in 1935 was
translated to New Orleans. His tenure
in New Orleans was marked by a great expansion of the population due to the
urbanization that marked the Great Depression and Rummel built Catholic
institutions: parishes, schools, high-schools and other facilities to better
serve the Catholic population of a very Catholic city. Rummel was slow to embrace desegregation but
in 1948 he admitted two African Americans to the Archdiocesan seminary as candidates for the
priesthood. In 1951 he mandated the
removal of “white” and “colored” signs from the churches and schools. And in 1953 he wrote a pastoral letter
mandating an end to segregation in Archdiocesan institutions but was not very
stringent about enforcing it. He did
close a parish in 1955 when parishioners refused to accept a Black priest.
The desegregation of the
Catholic schools was a major challenge.
The Archbishop clearly wanted the schools desegregated but was hesitant
to take on the local school boards that resisted the changes to the status
quo. Moreover, Catholic Schools were
peaking in enrollment precisely because as public schools had to be
desegregated after Brown vs. The Board of
Education, many parents were putting their children in parochial schools to
avoid integration. However, on March 27
1962 Archbishop Rummel announced that of the following autumn term the Catholic
schools would be integrated.
As far back as 1954 Catholic
segregationists had been organizing to resist desegregation. They had even written Pius XII asking for a
papal encyclical supporting racial segregation; to their chagrin the Pope
issued a statement condemning racism as a major evil in our world.
Archbishop Rummel wanted a
conciliatory approach towards desegregation but that was impossible in the heat
of the Civil Rights Movement. Catholics
organized White Citizens Councils and other groups to resist change. Parents took their children out of Catholic
Schools. Letter-writing campaigns deluged the chancery with countless letters
asking for the policy to be rescinded.
Patience exhausted the Archbishop said there would be no reversal and
anyone standing in his way would be excommunicated. Three dissenters, Judge Leander Perez, Jackson G. Ricau, and
Una Gaillot, were put under a ban of excommunication. And in the end, resistance collapsed and the
schools were integrated.
I relate this story
because I have received several comments objecting to my having written in a
previous post:
The issue
today is the sovereignty of conscience. In forming our conscience we
must pay serious attention to the teaching of the Church—but the teaching of
the Church cannot take the place of conscience nor can we be expected to give
blind obedience to the teaching of the Church as that would be equivalent to
resigning our personal responsibility for making moral decisions. We
need personally and seriously to consider the choices that face us in
life. The Church provides guidance, but it must be our interior
adherence to the Holy Spirit that sets our course.
Readers have brought up the
segregationist protesters and asking if my above statement doesn’t justify
their resistance. In a word, yes. If they were truly following their conscience,
believing that segregation was part of the Divine Law, they would be bound to
resist it. Given the clarity of the
magisterium on the issue however, it is highly unlikely that the three
excommunicates had seriously considered the teaching of the Church in forming
their consciences. But at the end of the
day, it is our conscience that must determine our action. Plenty of saints were excommunicated in their
day for standing their ground against bishops and even an occasional pope or
two. Conscience is sovereign and sometime
we have to pay the price for our convictions.
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