Black Catholics vs. the Church

By Richard N. Ostling

Since well before the Civil War, black Americans have been predominantly Protestant. Despite extensive outreach by the Roman Catholic Church, only 2 million of America's 54 million lay Catholics and 300 of the nation's 19,000 priests are black. Thirteen of 314 active Catholic bishops in the U.S. are black. The first black archbishop, Eugene Marino, was assigned to Atlanta only last year. Catholicism has not only had difficulty finding new recruits in the black community, it is even beginning to lose its grip on those few already in the fold.

Nowhere are the problems more evident than in Detroit and Washington, two archdioceses where the church is confronting sharp dissatisfaction among blacks. In Washington, a fiery, articulate black priest named George A. Stallings Jr., fed up with the church's treatment of blacks, plans to defy James Cardinal Hickey this week by inaugurating his own independent African- American Catholic Congregation. In Detroit, black resentment is aimed at Edmund Cardinal Szoka, who last week finally shut down 21 of the city's 114 parishes, mostly in black neighborhoods, with nine others soon to follow. The action came despite angry protests and eleventh-hour courtroom maneuvers by both black and white parishioners.

For Washington Catholics, Stallings is a figure to reckon with. During a twelve-year assignment, the 41-year-old priest built up a black parish from 200 to 2,000 families. Last year Hickey appointed him director of the archdiocese's evangelism program. Heedless of Hickey's stern warnings, Stallings is determined to celebrate Mass for his Imani (Swahili for faith) Temple, which will meet temporarily in a chapel at Howard University. How many of the archdiocese's 80,000 black parishioners will enlist in this self-made Catholicism? Jacqueline Wilson, who directs the Washington archdiocesan office for black Catholics, thinks "there are a lot who share his concern," but expects that most will stick with the official church. "No one," she believes, "can go off and start up his own church and call it Roman Catholic."

According to church law, only the diocesan bishop can authorize a new parish or decide where priests work. In a toughly worded response to Stallings' challenge two weeks ago, Hickey threatened to notify all U.S. bishops that the renegade priest was no longer in good standing and should henceforth be forbidden to speak at any Catholic institution in the U.S. Stallings is unapologetic. "I have been caught up in the spirit of destiny," says the rebel priest. "I know I am breaking canon law. But to stir up the conscience of a nation, I'll do it. When laws control, then laws enslave."

Stallings is regarded by critics as an inveterate grandstander whose grandiose actions could lead to his excommunication -- and eventually a schism within the church that could spread beyond Washington. He was recently president of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus and built a nationwide following through appearances in black parishes. He claims that he remains within the Catholic Church but rejects its hierarchical rule, charging that the bishops are imperialistic and the church racist. Imani Temple, vows Stallings, "will ask the people what we should be all about."

Catholicism, he believes, should allow experimental worship with broader appeal to the black community, including African-American Masses complete with recitations from black literature. Such an African-American liturgy with an all-black priesthood, Stallings believes, might be patterned after the Eastern rites within the Catholic Church. He seeks to combine "Baptist practices with the beauty and tradition of the Catholic faith." As a young Catholic in North Carolina, Stallings often attended an enthusiastic black Baptist church with his grandmother. Says he: "The church is failing to bind together the church with the needs and aspirations of African Americans."

In the Detroit imbroglio, Cardinal Szoka threatens to shut down another 25 parishes by next year unless offerings and memberships increase. Though many white worshipers too are hurt by the retrenchment, the archdiocese's 65,000 black Catholics especially feel that the church is abandoning them. Marian Gabriel, co-chair of a local black Catholic organization, considers Szoka's decision "blatantly racist." Says she: "This is the most disgusting thing I've ever run up against."

| Szoka has written movingly about the church's past failures in ministering to blacks. But the Cardinal felt compelled to take drastic action, in part because of Detroit's ruinous population decline. The city's churches, however, are also dying because they have failed to enlist any significant numbers of blacks when white ethnics began moving out of their neighborhoods. Says the Rev. Norman Thomas, a white priest who opposes the closings: "The church has not done an adequate job of being a church in the city, and that includes attracting blacks."

Poignantly, these events are occurring just after a meeting of the nation's bishops that endorsed a blueprint for stepped-up evangelism among blacks. A special report to the hierarchy warned that experts are deeply concerned about attrition among black Catholics "leaving the church for Protestant denominations where they will feel more at home." As developments in the two cities indicate, the losses could just be beginning.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Linda DiPietro/Detroit