Deferred Mission, The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Catholic Priests, 1871 - 1960
Deferred Mission, The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Catholic Priests, 1871 - 1960
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Date
1985
Authors
Ochs, Stephen J.
Advisor
Olson, Keith W.
Citation
Abstract
During the last quarter of the nineteenth, and well into the twentieth
century, St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart (Josephites) carried
the main burden of the Roman Catholic Church's meagre efforts among
black Americans. The Josephites built churches and schools throughout
the South and, more dramatically, pioneered in the ordination of black
Catholic priests in the United States. The exclusion of all but a
handful of black men from the Catholic priesthood had both symbolized
and helped to perpetuate the second class status of blacks within the
Catholic Church. Under their first American Superior General, the dynamic John R.
Slattery (1893-1904), the Josephites defied prevailing racist
ideology. They accepted blacks into their minor and major seminaries
and raised three of them to the priesthood between 1891 and 1907.
Unfortunately, however, the Josephites could not sustain their
pioneering endeavors on behalf of a black clergy in the midst of
deteriorating race relations in the United States after the turn of the
century. Southern bishops refused to accept black Josephites into their
dioceses. Slattery's successors as Superior General, especially Louis
B. Pastorelli (1918-1942 ), lacked his faith in black leadership,
shared some of the racist assumptions of American society, and found
themselves dependent upon the support of southern bishops. They accomodated their ecclesiatical superiors and effectively closed the
Josephite college and seminary to all but an occasional mulatto,
thereby forfeiting credibility among an important segment of black
Catholics. Leadership in the struggle for black priests passed to the
missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word. Not until the election
of Edward V. Casserly as Superior General (1942-1948), did the
Josephites return to their original policy of recruiting black men for
St. Joseph's Society. The struggle of the Josephites over the issue of black priests
illustrated the depth of the institutional racism that pervaded the
Catholic Church, the tendency of the Church to accomodate itself to
prevailing regional and national cultures, the limits of Vatican
influence over the American Church on sensitive social issues like
race, and the determination of black Catholics to secure their own
priestly spokesmen within the clerically dominated Catholic Church.