Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Remembering Fr. Lawrence Lucas and Understanding the Black Catholic Movement – An Interview with Matthew Cressler

Remembering Fr. Lawrence Lucas and Understanding the Black Catholic Movement – An Interview with Matthew Cressler

Last updated on: April 30, 2020 at 6:00 am by Melissa Borja

Remembering Fr. Lawrence Lucas and Understanding the Black Catholic Movement – An Interview with Matthew Cressler 2020-04-30T01:11:45-04:00 Melissa Borja

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Fr. Lawrence Lucas

Earlier this month, Fr. Lawrence Lucas, author of Black Priest, White Church and a prominent activist priest, passed away. To understand the impact of Fr. Lucas and the significance of the Black Catholic Movement more generally, I interviewed with Dr. Matthew Cressler, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston and author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017).

The following highlights of our conversation have been edited for clarity.

Dr. Matthew Cressler, Assistant Professor, College of Charleston

On the significance of Fr. Lawrence Lucas

Fr. Lawrence Lucas, who died on April 18, was an activist-priest instrumental in the Black Catholic Movement that transformed the U.S. Catholic church fifty years ago. His memoir-manifesto Black Priest, White Church: Catholics and Racism (1970) perfectly encapsulates the ways Black Power inspired and empowered so many Black Catholics at the time. Lucas is just one among many movement luminaries to pass away in recent years — Sr. Mary Antona Ebo (November 17, 2017), Fr. August Thompson (August 10, 2019), and Fr. George H. Clements (November 25, 2019), to name just a few. Fr. Lucas’ passing hit me quite hard since his book Black Priest, White Church quite literally changed my life. This book served as the spark that ignited the dissertation, which eventually became my book. I was blessed with the opportunity to meet and thank him in person, just a few years ago, at a gathering in Chicago. That book remains one of my top recommendations for anyone interested in learning more about racism in the Catholic Church and what Catholic racial justice could look like.

On the Meaning of “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic”

“Authentically Black and Truly Catholic” is a quote from a pastoral letter that the ten Black bishops of the United States wrote in 1984, and in that statement, they declared that Black Catholics had come of age, as a people, and that they could be both authentically Black and truly Catholic. They were speaking specifically about their worship practices, so that they could incorporate elements of, for lack of a better term, Black Church or Black Afro-Protestant religious practice into Catholic life and be still truly Catholic. In a sense the book offers a kind of twentieth-century history of how we get to that point because the twentieth century sees a tremendous growth in the African-American Catholic population of the United States–in 1940, there are about 300,000 African-American Catholics, and by 1975, there are close to a million, and then by the end of the twentieth century, closer to 3 million. So it’s a period of tremendous growth, but part of what the book argues is that what is means to be both Black and Catholic changes tremendously over that period as well…The book breaks down into two parts, and the first part is about African Americans in the midst of the Great Migrations becoming Catholic, converting to Catholicism in large numbers, and the second half is about the emergence of the embrace of Black Power by certain Black Catholic people, priests, sisters, and the creation of a distinctly Black way of being Catholic as they were understanding it to be. So it’s making interventions into how we understand American religion, how we understand African-American religion, how we understand Catholicism.

On Black Conversion to Catholicism during the Great Migration

What leads to a significant growth is you have African-Americans migrating from the south to urban industrial centers in the North and Midwest and West Coast. Many of those urban industrial centers are majority Catholic, or at least largely Catholic. And African-American migrants are encountering, in the neighborhoods that they are migrating into, Catholic parishes, Catholic institutions, and in some cases, Catholic missionaries, who start to make the decision that in order to preserve Catholicism and Catholic institutions in these transitioning neighborhoods, that they have to fill the emptying pews with African American converts to Catholicism…When [African Americans] come to Chicago, the majority white Catholic response is either to resist their migration to what were perceived as Catholic neighborhoods (by violence or by leaving—white flight to the suburbs) or, in the case of some priests and nuns, to basically shutter Catholic institutions to prevent them from being integrated or desegregated. But there, the story of my book begins by focusing on the exception to the rule, which are white Catholic sisters and priests who dedicate themselves to the conversion of African Americans.

…Conversion tends to happen in and around schools. African American parents quickly identified Catholic schools, Catholic educational institutions, as some of the best opportunities for their children in these neighborhoods to get a good education, and there is a kind of value, as well, to the kind of religious education and discipline that the schools provide. Parents and children aren’t required to convert to Catholicism to enroll. But they are at this time (I’m talking in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s) required to attend Mass, whether or not they are Catholic, and to attend religious instruction, whether or not they are Catholic. Thus, you have Catholic and non-Catholic African Americans alike saying Catholic prayers, engaging in Catholic rituals, being taught that the Catholic church is the one true church, being inculcated in a particular way of being religious, that in some ways, maybe not surprisingly, leads children to go to their parents and say, “Mom, I want to be Catholic,” and in some cases leads to the conversion of entire families.

…So at the height of this Great Migrations-era missionary movement, you would have on Easter Sundays upwards of a hundred to two hundred people being baptized on any given day–mass baptisms where you have a phalanx of priests and servers with water going down the line, baptizing people.

On the significance of centering Black Catholics in American Catholic history

Black Catholics’ embrace of the Black Power movement forces us to see the ways in which the Catholic church has operated often as a white institution…So in 1968, Black Catholic priests and brothers and sisters start caucusing and organizing, kind of inspired by the Black Power movement and galvanized by Martin Luther King’s assassination. And in the midst of that, one of big statements that they make is a declaration that the Catholic church is primarily a white, racist institution that serves and is very much a part of white culture…I think one of the things that you really get when you center Black Catholics is both a kind of theoretical framework for understanding white Catholicism as a racial formation, rather than generically talking about American Catholicism, or immigration Catholicism, or Irish and German and Polish Catholicism. Black Catholics, in their writing, in their activism, in their lives, reveal the kind of whiteness of Catholicism in a particular moment in time. Centering Black Catholics also gives us visions of alternative ways of being Catholic–whether that’s liturgically (the incorporation of Afro-diasporic and Afro-Protestant religious practices into Catholic life) or whether that’s politically (the kind of coalition building and alliances in the Black Power era that leads to Black Catholics and the Black Panther party in Chicago organizing together)…When you center Black Catholics, you both see Black Catholics for who they are, rather than who white Catholics maybe want them to be, and you also see white Catholics for who they are, in the sense of people who have been formed, religiously and racially, in a particular way of being religious.

On the significance of viewing Black religious history through a Catholic (and not Protestant) lens

One of the things that is really interesting about Black Catholic history in the twentieth century is that it simultaneously challenges the notion that there is any one, monolithic thing that we can call the “Black Church,” at the same time that it kind of reinforces the power and the normative notion that Afro-Protestantism holds. Black Catholics are an obvious example, and in the book I compare them explicitly to Muslims and Hebrews and Israelites–all of what Judith Weisenfeld called religio-racial movements. Black Catholics fit, I think, pretty squarely in the first half of the twentieth century into these creative ways that African Americans are fashioning new religious identities for themselves, that extend beyond Afro-Protestantism, beyond what we often call the Black Church. And actually, like those other movements, [Black Catholicism] often is explicitly critiquing that notion of what it means to be Black and religious. So Black Catholics–African Americans who convert to Catholicism in the early twentieth century–are often saying, “Well, I love the quiet dignity of Catholic ritual practice,” by which they are sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly critiquing what they take to be the kind of spontaneity and exuberance and improvisational nature of what they may have experienced in Black Baptist or Black holiness or Pentecostal communities…Centering Catholics really challenges a sense that the Black Church can somehow be used as a synonym for kind of Black religiosity at large.

…Black Catholics in the U.S. didn’t always see themselves as part of the Black Church in the way that it has become much more common now to do so. In fact, what led tens of thousands of African Americans to convert to Catholicism in the early twentieth century was actually, for many of them, an attempt to distinguish themselves from what was increasingly becoming understood as the normative way of being Black and religious.

African American Religion

Previous Post

April 29, 2020

How Unique is Our Present Crisis Really?

Next Post

May 1, 2020 A Saint for Failed States and Refugee Crises

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Simon Peter Judas Iscariot John James