The Catholic Church and Segregation

Archbishop Thomas Toolen

of Mobile 1927-1969

Racial segregation was a given fact in U.S. society from the time that African slaves were first imported to Jamestown in 1619 until the mid-twentieth century and, in fact, continues today to lurk in various discrete nooks and crannies of our society. At the very beginning the Africans were treated as indentured servants and given their freedom after serving a designated number of years, but within a matter of twenty years this began to change and various court decisions ruled that Africans bought from Spanish or Portuguese traders were to be held in permanent servitude.  At the time of our Declaration of Independence in 1776, all thirteen colonies permitted slavery but gradually over the next thirty plus years Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and the New England States each passed laws abolishing slavery.  As Florida and Louisiana became American possessions they maintained the institution of slavery as they had known it under Spanish and French rule. 

There were social protocols governing the relationships of masters and servants, whether those servants be free or enslaved.  A servant was a member of the household, but not of the family.  Just like the Downton Abbey of early 20^th century England, servants never dined with the family, though a member of the family might, on occasion, eat with the servants.  Servants had their own living quarters distinct from the family.  Family members, no matter how young, were always spoken to by title by the servants and servants were always called by either their Christian name or their surname but never with a title.  If servants were in the family quarters it was to serve, not just to entertain themselves.  Separation was not strict—masters and servants often worked together on the farm or the buildings.  Servants helped dress and undress their masters and mistresses.  Conversations, while always correct and somewhat formal, might still be fairly intimate in content. 

The Catholic Church, like most of the Protestant Churches—Anglican, Reformed/Presbyterian, and after 1800 Baptist and Methodist, took slavery for granted.  The Maryland Jesuits, the only priests legally in the colonies before the Revolution, supported their mission work by the large plantations they owned and the slaves that worked them.  There was considerable debate among theologians about slavery and a distinction was drawn, as it has been about war, about “unjust” and “just” enslavement.  Nevertheless, the Church was slow to move against slavery.  Between 1573 and 1826 books arguing that slavery was fundamentally immoral ended up on the Index of Forbidden Books.  Some clergy who called for the emancipation of slaves in the United States were excommunicated.  It was only in 1839 that arch-conservative Pope Gregory XVI issued the Bull In Supremo Apostolatus condemning both the slave trade and the institution itself. 

In all this we must remember that the United States was not the only country practicing the enslavement of human persons.  Far more to the consciousness of the Roman Church was Latin America where slavery both of native peoples and imported African slaves was widespread.  By the time that Gregory issued his Bull, slavery had begun to disappear in the Latin American scene, at least as a formal institution.  The reaction of the U.S. Bishops to In Supremo Apostolatus was much the same as their more contemporary successors would give to the papal teaching on war, nuclear weapons, economic justice, and now, rights of immigrants.  They explained it away or, for the most part, just ignored it.  By Gregory’s time, the issue of slavery had become a powder keg threatening to blow up the Union and the bishops chose to turn a blind eye to slavery and a deaf ear to the papal magisterium.

Well, the Bishops may not have touched the match to the fuse but the blowup came and passed with way too much blood shed and the aftermath was not pretty.

This posting is not about slavery but about segregation and in the years immediately following the Civil War the Northern military governments controlling the Southern States which had been “in rebellion” instituted a program called “Reconstruction.”  In an attempt to right the wrongs of slavery (and to rub the rebel noses in the mud and remind them that they lost the war) many of the social institutions of the “Old South” were gutted.  Former slaves found themselves able to vote and to hold office while their masters, until they took an oath of allegiance to the Union could not.  The powerful were cast down from their thrones and the lowly were raised up, but it was a shaky and fragile state of things.  When the political winds in Washington changed, as they always do, and Reconstruction ended not with a bang but a whimper, those Blacks who had collaborated with the Reconstructionist “carpet baggers” found themselves out on a limb.  As more and more whites were able to vote they took over the political machinery and instituted a series of laws known as the Jim Crow Laws that established strict segregation of the races.  There were to be “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, and other public institutions for whites and for “people of color.”  They got the separate part right, but didn’t score high on the equal.  There were “separate but equal” rest rooms, swimming pools, and waiting rooms.  Restaurants were free to serve only whites and any restaurant that wanted to succeed in the white community did precisely that.  Whites and Blacks shopped at different stores, worshipped at different churches, and were buried in different cemeteries.  It was illegal for Blacks and Whites to intermarry and to be licensed to perform a wedding clergy had to post a bond that guaranteed that they would perform no such wedding. 

Now, before we think this is a Southern issue, the Northern States had a far more discrete method of segregation.  An African-American family looking to buy a home was shown homes in neighborhoods with other African-American families and Whites lived in White neighborhoods.  This meant, of course, that schools would be predominately White or “Colored” depending on the neighborhood.  And just like in the south, the schools where the majority of students were of African descent were last to receive books, experienced teachers, and educational materials.  As for churches—the parochial system in the United States guaranteed that Catholic churches in white neighborhoods would be white; those in Black neighborhoods would minister to the Black Catholic community, which generally was quite small.  I remember myself seeing, probably around 1960, a number of people stand up and leave the communion rail when a black family appeared at it.  To the Church’s credit, however, it provided many good and affordable parochial schools in Black parishes which gave children an opportunity to get ahead in competition of better high schools and colleges.  There were several religious orders of women established to work with African American children but most of the traditionally White communities pitched in just as hard.  If anything good can be said about the Church’s response to racial injustice, it is due to the women, not to the men. 

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the American bishops accepted the segregation status quo without complaint.  Although Missouri, a slave state, had remained in the Union during the Civil War it, like other Border States such as Kentucky and Maryland, had adopted the strict segregation policies of the deep South.  The Archdiocese of Saint Louis ran a good number of Catholic Schools for Black Children but the schools were all strictly segregated.  In the 1940’s progressive clergy—especially the Jesuits at Saint Louis University—began to press for an end to segregation and the Archbishop, John Glennon (later Cardinal), an octogenarian, fought the change from segregation.  Glennon, incidentally was not a Southerner himself but was Irish born and bred.  One priest, a member of the faculty at Saint Louis University, gave a blistering sermon that was reported in newspapers across the country accusing the Archdiocese of Saint Louis of immorality in its racial policies.  Other priests also spoke up in favor of integration and organized to push for integration of Church institutions.  In 1943 Webster College, a woman’s college run by the Sisters of Loretto agreed to accept black students.  Glennon contact the superior of the Sisters at the Motherhouse in Kentucky and had the decision reversed.  However the Jesuits at Saint Louis University began admitting African American students at the (then) all-male University. The relationship of the Jesuits at Saint Louis University and the Archbishops of Saint Louis has some interesting chapters, renewed again during the episcopate of our dear Cardinal Burke. 

The story was not much different elsewhere.  Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore/Washington resisted pressure to integrate the schools and parish of his Archdiocese which included the national capital.  As the Civil Rights Movement picked up momentum Catholic clergy were initially absent from the ranks because their bishops and religious superiors refused them permission to participate.  Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, one of the greatest blemishes on history of the Church in the United States, suspended priests for preaching in favor of Civil Rights for African Americans.  Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Mobile had made it clear that no priest was to participate in the marches with Dr. Martin Luther King and other Black leaders.   Once again, it was the women who led the way as the nuns showed up where the priests feared to go.  In fact, much of the “radicalization” of American Religious Women is rooted in their experience of challenging both the authority of the bishops and the power of social norms in their participation in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Toolen is an interesting example of the ambivalence of the American hierarchy towards racial justice.  He opened new churches, hospitals, schools, and orphanages to minister exclusively to African Americans and was derided as “the nigger bishop” for his commitment to work in the Black community.  In 1950 he opened Saint Martin de Porres Hospital in Mobile where both African American and White physicians could practice.   In 1964 he ordered the integration of the Catholic schools in his diocese—of course this was ten years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated integration of public schools.  To be fair, however, most public schools in the south had yet to be integrated so this is another instance where the Church is slow but still on the cutting edge.  As stated above he opposed the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations and forbad the clergy from participating.  One priest, Father Maurice Ouellet of the Edmundite Fathers was removed from his pastorate for permitting the parish rectory to be used for organizational meetings for Civil Rights Events.  He also rejected African Americans as seminary candidates for priesthood. One of those rejected, Joseph Howze, later became the first Bishop of Biloxi.

In my next posting we will deal with the saga of Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans and the excommunication of Judge Leander Perez, Jackson G. Ricau, and Una Gaillot, three segregationists who opposed his desegregation of Catholic Institutions in New Orleans Archdiocese.  

Vatican II And Social Theology

Is there a relationship between

Vatican II and a Theology of

Social Reform?

After my entry yesterday, I do need to be fair to Archbishop Thomas Toolen who was Bishop (Archbishop was a personal title; he was not metropolitan) of Mobile Alabama from 1927 to 1969.  In the early and mid ‘60’s Toolen, as I mentioned, forbad the priests and religious in his diocese to participate in the Civil Rights movement.  It was a volatile time in Alabama, and indeed in the United States.  Americans by the busload were travelling down from Northern cities such as New York and Detroit and Chicago to stand in solidarity with southern African-Americans who were trying to register to vote and to end the segregation policies that were making them second-class citizens.  People standing up for civil rights—both African-Americans and white supporters—were being bullied, injured, and killed in outrageous acts of violence.  Law enforcement officials were not only facilitating these crimes but were meeting the non-violent protests with savage attacks by police dogs and fire houses.  The worst act of violence was the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1964 in which four young girls were killed by white terrorist member of the Klan.  Toolen’s prohibition of clergy and religious supporting the demonstrations could be construed as distancing the Church from the occasions of violence that were accompanying the Civil Rights movement but the presence—the notable presence of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Church leaders—including the distinguished and saintly Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakavos, was a tremendous embarrassment to those Catholics who believed the importance of the cause required the risks. 

On the other hand as Bishop, Toolen showed great pastoral concern for African-Americans regardless of religion.  He opened hospitals to care for them when white hospitals would not accept patients of color.  In 1950 Saint Martin de Porres hospital in Mobile became the first hospital in Alabama where white and black physicians served jointly on the hospital staff, though the patients were exclusively African-American.  In 1964 he desegregated the Catholic schools in the state of Alabama.  Toolen would not accept African-American candidates for the priesthood however, and one whom he turned down—Joseph Howze—later became the Bishop of Biloxi. And in 1965 Toolen expelled Father Maurice Ouellet of the Edmundites from the diocese because he had permitted organizational meetings for the Selma marches on parish property.  In other words, Toolen was a man of charity but not of justice and this is a crucial distinction as there are many who believe that our duty as Christians is to give succor to the poor but not necessarily to correct the injustices that cause the poverty. In fact, one change which comes not from the Council itself but from the Encyclical Letter Mater et Magistra of John XXIII and then is reinforced in the Council—and subsequent papal teaching—is that authentic charity is committed to the pursuit of justice.  Our old idea of “charity” as almsgiving is a deficient understanding of the virtue.  While generosity or the desire to offer aid to those who are suffering is one aspect of charity, the theological virtue of charity is the most profound expression of the Divine Nature—quoniam Deus caritas est (1 John 4:8).  And as an expression of the Divine Nature, charity is essentially oriented towards Justice—that is, towards the order of things being conformed to the Divine Will. 

Of course for centuries people believed—and Churchmen taught—that the divergence of wealth and poverty in the world is the Divine Will; that some are rich because God wills them to be rich, others are poor because God wills them to be poor.  The 19^th century Anglican hymn-writer Mrs. Cecil F. Alexander put it this way in her famous hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful.

The rich man in his castle,

         The poor man at his gate,
         God made them high and lowly,
         And ordered their estate.

Since Mater et Magistra, the Catholic Church has moved away from this idea and has increasingly questioned the morality of extremes of wealth and poverty in our world, but a great part of the reaction against Vatican II among contemporary Catholics is a reaction against the Church’s message of Social Justice.  Former Catholic Glen Beck told his listeners that when they hear “Social Justice” in Church they should flee that Church.  Michael Voris—a very unreliable source for things Catholic, has called the message of Social Justice a distortion of our Catholic faith.  The Lefebvrites—the schismatics who followed the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre out of the Church in protest against the changes of the Second Vatican Council, are rooted in the conservative social and economic doctrines of the Action Française. The Tridentine Mass, at least in the United States, attracts congregations that are white and upper-middle class, first-generation of superfluous wealth, precisely because they can be sure that the priests who offer these liturgies will not preach a Gospel that supports socio-economic reforms.  (I have been told that in Great Britain the situation is somewhat different and the “Extraordinary Form” attracts intellectuals and social liberals, but I don’t know the reliability of this report.)   

When we look at the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council in some depth we should probably see how the Liturgy itself has been restructured to make us more aware of the relationship between the Worship of God and the Gospel call to social justice, but this much seems clear that there is a direct relationship between those who support the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the commitment to Justice.  There seems also to be a corresponding relationship between those who reject, dismiss, or water down the teachings of the Council—including those who insist on a “hermeneutic of continuity”—and those who promote the existing social-economic policies.