National Black Catholic History Month: Knights of Peter Claver and Ladies Auxiliary

You have, no doubt, heard of the Knights of Columbus. It's hard to find a spot in the U.S. that doesn't know the group for its fish fries, game nights, spelling bees or political stances.

Are you equally as familiar with the Knights of Peter Claver, though?

The group is named in honor of St. Peter Claver, a Spanish Jesuit who traveled to what is now Colombia in the early 1600s. There, he worked in the service of enslaved Africans, advocating on their behalf with their owners, treating their injuries and praying with and for them.

The Knights of Peter Claver were founded by four Josephite priests in Mobile, Ala., in 1909, as a fraternal Catholic men's organization. Today it is the largest historically black Catholic lay organization in the U.S. Its headquarters is in New Orleans.

During the past 100+ years, the Knights have provided financial support to organizations including the NAACP, Urban League, National Black Clergy, National Black Sisters Conferences, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Black Catholic Congress and Xavier University of New Orleans.

The current Supreme Knight of the organization is F. DeKarlos Blackmon, who is thought to be the youngest ever leader of the organization (he also has an active presence on Facebook). The current Supreme Lady of the Ladies Auxiliary is Vertelle A. Kenion.

Learn more about the Knights of Peter Claver at the organization's website.

(Images via Knights of Peter Claver Tampa and BlackPast.org)

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National Black Catholic History Month: Father Charles Randolph Uncles

We've already discussed the claims Bishop James Augustine Healy (who was never known to publicly identify as black) and Father Augustus Tolton have to the title "first black American priest," but did you know there's also a third candidate?

Meet Father Charles Randolph Uncles.

Uncles was born about 1859 or 1860 in Baltimore, Md., (which had a significant population of black Catholics) to Lorenzo and Anna Uncles. The members of the Uncles family reportedly were fair-skinned enough to pass for white, but declined to do so. He was educated in Quebec, Canada, but later studied for the priesthood at St. Joseph Seminary in Baltimore.

He was ordained in Baltimore in 1891. That was a few years after Tolton's ordination and decades after Healy's ordination, but since Uncles was the only one of our three "first black American priest" candidates both to have identified as black and been ordained in the United States, he is often said to have the only true claim to the title. The first U.S. ordination of a black man merited mention in the New York Times the day after it happened.

For most of his life, Uncles taught students Latin, Greek and English at schools in Baltimore and upstate New York. He died July 21, 1933.

Father Uncles also had an important role to play in the founding of the Josephites, the subject of tomorrow's post.

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National Black Catholic History Month: Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB

Meet Father Cyprian Davis, OSB.

The National Black Catholic Congress has described him as the "single most important leader in historical studies of the African-American Catholic Church in the United States."

The Washington, D.C., native and prolific writer is a graduate of Saint Meinrad College, The Catholic University of America and University of Louvain. He has been a Benedictine monk of Saint Meinrad Archabbey since 1951.

He teaches at the Saint Meinrad seminary. He also has taught at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans, according to his Saint Meinrad faculty profile.

He has been a tremendous inspiration to historians as well as black American Catholics and seminarians.

(Image via Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology)

Some works written or co-authored by Father Davis (all Amazon links):
Henriette Delille: Servant of Slaves, Witness to the Poor
Stamped with the Image of God: African Americans as God's Image in Black
Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States
The History of Black Catholics in the United States
To Prefer Nothing to Christ



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National Black Catholic History Month: Daniel Rudd

Daniel Rudd was born in 1854 to two slaves who lived on different plantations in the area of Bardstown, Ken. Both parents were Catholics. When he was baptized, his owner's daughter served as his sponsor.

After the Civil War, Rudd was educated in Ohio, where he worked as a journalist and founded a weekly newspaper, the Ohio State Tribune. He soon changed the name to the American Catholic Tribune (today known as the African American Catholic Tribune), which was the first Catholic publication owned and operated by a black man. He also worked for many years in Arkansas, where he invented a machine to load gravel and wrote a biography of the state's first black millionaire.

Rudd, who wanted to find a way to unite black Catholics and fight for their equality within the Church, founded the National Black Catholic Congress, then known as the Colored Catholic Congress, in 1889. During the first gathering, in Washington, D.C., President Grover Cleveland invited the group's leaders to the White House. Fr. Augustus Tolton, a man whom many consider to be the first black American Catholic priest, celebrated Mass for the group.

Rudd died in 1933, but the organization he founded still lives on. NBCC had its most recent conference in 2012 in Indianapolis.


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National Black Catholic History Month: Cardinal Francis Arinze

About 20 years ago, my mother and I were in Vatican City when we noticed a black man -- clearly an African -- wearing a bishop's robes.

He was clearly somewhat preoccupied and in a hurry, but did smile and nod at us.

We knew instantly who he was: then-Archbishop, now-Cardinal Francis Arinze, the man who for 20 years was the answer to the question "Who will be the next* black pope (these days, the answer to that question is Cardinal Peter Turkson)?"

Arinze was born in 1932 in Nigeria into a family that practiced a traditional Igbo faith. He converted to Catholicism as a child (and was baptized by Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi). He was ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1958.

He made headlines in 1965 when he was named a bishop in Nigeria at the age of 32, which made him the youngest bishop in the world. He later was the first black African of the modern era named as archbishop in Africa.

In 1985, Pope John Paul II called him to work in Rome. In 1996, the pope made him a cardinal. He was then the most high-profile black cardinal, so his name was often mentioned when people wondered whether the cardinals would ever choose a non-European pope.

Cardinal Arinze is the former leader of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, which is the small group of cardinals and Vatican functionaries who handle matters related to the Church's liturgical practices.

At age 81, Cardinal Arinze continues to live in Rome, although because of his age, he can no longer participate in any conclaves to choose a pope.

*Sometimes people say "first" black pope, but we already know there have been several.

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National Black Catholic History Month: Sister Thea Bowman, F.S.P.A., PhD

"Are you walkin with me?" Sister Thea Bowman from UM Southern Studies on Vimeo.

The woman who became known as Sister Thea Bowman was born Bertha Bowman in 1937 in Yazoo City, Miss. She was the only child of a teacher and the city's only black physician.

Although her parents were Methodists, they sent her to the Holy Child Jesus mission school in the city, which was staffed by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. She was so impressed by the sisters' example and work that she converted to Catholicism while still in elementary school and became a member of FSPA, taking the name Thea, while still a teen.

After studying at Vitterbo University and Catholic University of America, where she wrote her dissertation on William Faulkner, Sister Thea began teaching, a career that would ultimately take her to schools and universities in Wisconsin, Louisiana and her native Mississippi.

After she had worked nearly two decades as a teacher, the bishop of her home diocese of Jackson, Miss., invited her to work as a consultant for intercultural awareness, meaning that she had to take on the complicated work of trying to find ways to bring black and white Catholics together both in Mississippi and nationwide at a time when much of the nation was still grappling with how the Civil Rights Movement had changed the country. She also encouraged U.S. bishops to pay attention to and try to find ways to incorporate the voices of black Catholics. Sister Thea was a charismatic speaker who made dozens of appearances each year.

She worked with Archbishop James P. Lyke on the popular African American Catholic hymnal, Lead Me, Guide Me.

Sister Thea was diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-1980s. She famously told friends, admirers and the people who came to hear her speak that she was not cowed by her diagnosis.

"I want to live until I die," she said.

By the late 1980s, she had to give her acclaimed speeches and presentations from a wheelchair.

Sister Thea died in 1990, at age 52, in the home where she grew up.

Schools and community centers in Pittsburgh, Penn.; East St. Louis, Ill.; Utica, N.Y.; Cleveland, Ohio; and Gary, Ind.; among others, are named for her.

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National Black Catholic History Month: Bishop James Augustine Healy

Remember when I said there was some debate about who actually was the first black priest in the U.S.?

Meet another one of the candidates: Bishop James Augustine Healy.

He was one of nine children born to an Irish slaveowner and a woman who was said to be the slaveowner's mixed-race, common-law wife. With their wealthy father's assistance, the Healy children were educated in the northern U.S. Three of the sons became priests. One, Father Patrick Francis Healy, is today considered the first man of recent African descent to become a Jesuit, the first person of recent African descent to earn a PhD and the first person of recent African descent to lead a predominantly white college (my alma mater, Georgetown University). Another brother, Michael Healy, was the first man of recent African descent to command a ship for the U.S. military. All three of the family's daughters also became nuns (including one who may well have been the first woman of African descent to have the position of Mother Superior in an order).

James Augustine Healy was born in Jones County, Georgia, in 1830. After being educated at Quaker schools, Healy attended College of the Holy Cross, where he converted to Catholicism and graduated first in his class in 1849. He was ordained at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1854 (which places his ordination a full 32 years before that of another candidate for the role of first black American priest, Father Augustus Tolton). He returned from France to take up a position at a church in Boston, Mass., where he remained for several years, working with recent Irish Catholic immigrants. In 1875, Pope Pius IX named Healy as bishop of Portland, Maine, where he would remain until his death at age 70. He was the first person of recent African descent named as a bishop in the U.S.

Although Healy may well have been the first black priest and bishop in the U.S., like his siblings, he was quite fair-skinned and publicly identified as Irish-American. Although born a slave, no records indicate that he ever spoke or wrote formally about slavery or the experiences of black Americans.



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It's National Black Catholic History Month

(Image via Catholic News Service/St. Louis Review)

Yes, today is All Saints Day, a Holy Day of Obligation to Catholics. Today is also the first day of National Black Catholic History Month.

That means very little to most people, but it means a lot to me.

Surveys indicate that there might be about 275 million Catholics of African descent in the world; I am one.

I'll be posting throughout the month about black (mostly American, I think) Catholics and the black Catholic experience.

More on Catholics of African descent:
Demographics
Websites of interest
Ministry resources
National Black Catholic Congress

Follow my National Black Catholic History Month tag for more information on black Catholic notables.