Catholic Church and Desegregation: The Archbishop Rummel Story

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. 

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.  

Something to Consider

President Eisenhower meeting Pope John XXIII

We will take just a little break on this issue of how the bishops came to live like princes because I want to reflect on something I heard in homily today.  The preacher said that he is old enough to have lived in the United States when Christian values still shaped the culture.  He explicitly tied this to “The Eisenhower and Kennedy Years.”  This Christian culture, he claimed, shaped “western” (European and American) culture from the time of Constantine the Great (c.312) until our own day.  But then, he said, in the fifty years subsequent we have morphed into a “post-Christian” culture shaped by the values of secularism.  He wasn’t criticizing this evolution but only saying that even as in the pre-Constantinian era Christians had to be witnesses to their faith in a non-Christian culture, so too today we need once again to speak up for Evangelical values.  To fail to do so is to be like Peter who declared, “I do not know the man.”

What has caused this slide into the post-Christian West?  First of all, it probably wasn’t quite as sudden as the preacher claimed.  Its roots can be found in the rationalism of the scholastics, in the nominalism of William of Ockham, in the Reformation’s challenge to Church authority, certainly in the Enlightenment, in the French Revolution’s ending the alliance of “Throne and Altar,” in the anti-clericalism of 19^th century Freemasonry, in the nihilism of Nietzsche, and the materialism of Marx.  There are no sharp curves in history—or at least very few of them.  But still, for those of us old enough to have lived through the Eisenhower years, there is a very different tone in America today and it is troubling to those of us who feel alienated from the cultural mainstream because we hold on to our Christian faith not simply as private devotion but as a set of practical teachings which we believe that are individually and collectively in our best interest as a society.

Some put all the blame on the Second Vatican Council and claim that the Church itself has abandoned its traditional values, but in fact it is not Catholicism that has lost its influence, but Christianity.  Religious groups, and particularly so-called “Evangelicals” who experienced nothing at all like the Council and its revision of teaching and practice, are as culturally alienated as are the most committed Catholics.  The cultural attempts to push religion out of the public square are not limited to Catholics—or, for that matter, Christians.  Muslims and religious Jews find it no easier in America today to fit in culturally.  The ascendant culture is a type of secularism that does not treat the various religions as on a level field—it is a rabid secularism that wants to sweep all religion from the public square. 

When one recalls the role that religion, and especially Christianity, played in the Civil Rights movement and has played in the peace movement, the loss of the religious voice in the public square would not only be unfortunate, it could be dangerous.  Admittedly Catholicism was late in coming to both movements—and admittedly mainline Christianity did not have a mitigating influence on the introduction and maintenance of slavery into this country, but you can tell neither story of the Civil Rights Movement nor of the Peace Movement without talking about Christianity and Christians. 

I think Christians need to take a long serious look at the compromises we have made with what is termed “liberal” society and ask ourselves if we really want to go down in complacent acquiescence with this ethically bankrupt culture that has taken over our lives.  On the other hand, to hold on to the shreds of Eisenhower’s America is no way to go morally.  The “Christian” America of Eisenhower years allowed for racism; it allowed for sexual violence within the family, the military, and even the Church; it allowed for glass-ceilings that prevented women from rising in the professions; it caricatured Jews; it limited the opportunities for Latinos, Blacks, and immigrants.  Men were held to different (and lower) moral standards than women.  Justice was not equal for all.  Lives and careers were destroyed by rumors and blacklists that had nothing more for basis than rumor or revenge. 

If we want to re-introduce Christianity to the predominant culture in our society we are going to have to take a radical re-look at many of the ideas we take for granted. We are going to have to develop an authentically Christian feminism and this has to go way beyond the pious prattle that a women’s highest vocation is motherhood.  We are going to have to critically reexamine how we can stay faithful to our understanding of human sexuality and yet not foster discrimination, much less violence, against those whose gender identity doesn’t fit our concepts.  We are going to have to look at marriage and family in far more complex ways than we have looked in the past.  We are going to have to evolve a theology of the human person that doesn’t incorporate cookie-cutter “givens.”  In other words, if Christianity is going to influence our culture in the future, it will have to be a very different Christianity than that of a generation ago.  This doesn’t mean it will forget its Tradition, but that it will see Tradition as a living, therefore evolving, reality.

Perhaps the key to this new Christianity that is needed if we are not to be swept off the stage of public life is found in the thought of Avery Dulles.  In his book The Catholicity of the Church Dulles asserted that the first thousand years of the papacy was about evangelizing; the second thousand about power; and the third thousand will be about service.  We are on that tectonic plate—it is time to shift from the power model to the service model.  While Dulles explicitly speaks of the papal office, I think it about the Church as a whole.  If we want to be players in the next thousand years, we must become the servants of all.  Actually, I think Jesus said something to that effect.  

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.