Jim Crow Catholicism

When Christ said 'If you wish to be perfect, come and follow Me,' did He mean by 'you' only persons of Caucasian ancestry?" So the Rev. Claude H. Heit-haus, S.J., of Marquette University angrily asks in the current issue of the Jesuit weekly America. Professor Heithaus had recently read that 17 diocesan seminaries, 52 religious seminaries and 25 congregations of nuns of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. are now accepting Negro candidates. That reminded him that there are 47 Roman Catholic diocesan seminaries, 285 religious seminaries and 209 congregations of nuns still unaccounted for.

Said Jesuit Heithaus: "We are asking too much if we expect Negroes to see Christ's church in an organization that seems (to them at least) to be run by whites, for whites, and according to white men's notions . . . No matter how shabby a store-front church may be, most Negroes would unhesitatingly prefer it to the most magnificent Catholic church -in which a Negro would be shunned, stared at or given the deep-freeze treatment. Most Negroes would prefer such a church even to our so-called 'Negro' churches in which an all-Negro congregation is served by all-white priests."

In their own Protestant churches, Father Heithaus pointed out, "Negroes do not feel that they are peripheral nonentities, ruled over, preached at, arranged for and perhaps condescended to--by the great white man. In them Negroes can see bishops and ministers who represent their race in the worship of God and thereby dignify it . . ." But in the Roman Catholic Church "almost all of our cities, north and south, are without a single Negro priest who is a pastor . . . 'Negro priest' sounds like 'square circle' to the average American."

Father Heithaus waggled a warning finger at the white Catholic "who rises with a face set in the hard lines of racial anger or hate and shouts: 'Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?' " For that question, he had another question and a sharp answer:

"When St. Paul preached 'There is no more Jew or Gentile; you are all one in Christ Jesus, who is all and in all,' did they sneer at Him: 'How would you like to have your sister marry a Gentile?' If they did, do you suppose that He compromised Christianity for the sake of popularity or money?

"Perhaps they never asked Him. Perhaps they were not quite as pagan in their thinking as some of our finished products, who learned their religion in 'Catholic' parishes and schools that excluded Catholic Negroes."

In Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine this week, a mixed congregation of 5,000 whites and Negroes attended the New York Interracial Fellowship's fifth annual "race relations service." "The human race is a social solidarity," said Bishop William J. Walls of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. "The church will free its soul and hands only if it removes from itself the stigma that it is the most segregated institution in the United States ... By letting itself become the agent of separation and aloofness it has failed so far."

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