by Tanner Colby
Then, in 1889, Francis Jaansens, a Dutchman, was named archbishop of New Orleans. Jaansens brought with him a sharp mind for fiscal matters, and he very capably pulled the church back from financial collapse. On the emerging question of Jim Crow, however, he proved far less adept. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who looked upon blacks in a condescending, paternalistic way, Jaansens was a genuine advocate for racial equality in the church; he openly lobbied for more colored priests to join the seminary, for example, and was instrumental in seeing several ordained. In this, his motivations were genuine. Also, since emancipation, black Catholics had been pushing to participate more fully in the liturgy and the community life of their parishes, and Jaansens was eager to oblige them—if blacks could not fully join in the Catholic faith, they would go across the street and join the Protestants, and there would be no getting them back.
Despite his good intentions, Jaansens was also a foreigner, unschooled in the racial politics of the South, and his concern for blacks was being overtaken by fear of his fellow whites. As the 1890s progressed, Jim Crow laws had a disturbing effect on the national mood. Whites began to accept, and then to insist, that separation from blacks in all public areas was natural and right. White Catholics began to ask, “If we don’t share restaurants and railcars, why should we go to church together?” (Even though they had always gone to church together.) In rural areas, away from the church’s authority, white parishioners began making violent threats against their own pastors for holding integrated masses. One priest in southwest Louisiana was so scared of his own congregation that he took to saying mass with a loaded pistol under his vestments. So how was the diocese to give blacks a greater role in the Catholic faith at a time when more and more whites simply wanted them out? Jaansens thought he had the answer.
The basic unit of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy is the territorial parish. As its name suggests, a territorial parish is defined by its geographical boundaries; it is designed to be the anchor of the community that surrounds it. “As a general rule, a parish should be territorial, i.e., it should embrace all the Christian faithful within a certain territory.” So says the church’s law books. The exceptions to this rule are called “nonterritorial” or “national” parishes, and they take a different approach to “forming a community.” They’re defined not by geography but by language or ethnicity. If, for example, thousands of Vietnamese Catholic refugees emigrated to Minneapolis tomorrow, the local diocese might establish a “National Vietnamese Parish,” giving mass in the Vietnamese language and offering social services tailored to that group’s specific needs. For the German, Polish, and Italian immigrants who flooded into America during the nineteenth century, national parishes had often served as necessary way stations on the road to assimilation. After the Civil War, the church’s official position was that, in light of America’s “peculiar situation,” local bishops had the discretion to decide whether an integrated territorial parish was even feasible, or if an ethnic or national parish would be better suited “for the profit and salvation of the Negroes.”
Jaansens began to entertain the idea of a “National Negro Parish,” a place where a colored congregation alone could enjoy fuller autonomy without troubling the waters of the diocese. Except that blacks in southern Louisiana weren’t immigrants. They were not a separate nationality. They were very much Americans. They spoke the language, had lived here for centuries, and already belonged to established churches in the territorial parishes where they resided. For them, a National Negro Parish would not be a step toward assimilation, but a step back.
The archbishop went back and forth on the plan. He wrote his fellow clergy for counsel, and they wrote back with advice along the lines of “What a terrible idea” and “Don’t do it.” Similar protests were voiced by the Comité des Citoyens. Having failed to halt the institution of separate railcars, the group now put all its chips on stopping Jaansens’s Negro parish. The Comité publicly challenged the diocese, saying the plan would put God’s stamp of approval on the injustice of segregation. “If men are divided by, or in, the Church,” they wrote in a newspaper editorial, “where can they be united in the bonds of faith and love of truth and justice?” The archbishop had his own reservations, too, readily admitting that “a church for colored people alone may deepen ill feeling and separate still more the two races.…” Still, after mulling it over, Jaansens made his decision.
On May 19, 1895, with great fanfare, the Archdiocese of New Orleans opened the doors of St. Katherine’s, New Orleans’s first Negro parish. The church itself was a hand-me-down, the old home of a majority-white parish that had moved to fancier digs up the street. At St. Katherine’s inaugural mass, Jaansens spent the whole of his sermon justifying the church’s creation, denying that it was in any way a step down, or back. The church was optional, he stressed, repeatedly. It was a place for blacks to come only “if they prefer” or “if they want” or “if they desire.”
But the Comité des Citoyens called it for what it was: a Jim Crow church. Defiant, they called on all people of color to boycott St. Katherine’s. Most did. The new parish was not a huge success. It drew enough congregants to remain open, but baptismal records of the time show that the majority of blacks stayed in their territorial parishes. Plans for a second Negro church in New Orleans were scuttled following a great deal of protest from both blacks and the local clergy. When Jaansens died in 1897, the drive for Negro parishes died with him; no more would be seen for a decade.
That decade, however, was one of the worst in America’s already miserable racial history. Restrictive housing covenants made their debut. Lynching, a common practice since the end of the Civil War, reached epidemic levels, the highest the nation had ever seen. In 1909, Hubert Blenk was named the new archbishop of New Orleans, and by that time the racial climate in the city had become toxic. Blenk eyed a solution in Jaansens’s national parish experiment. But what Jaansens saw as optional, the new archbishop saw as essential, mandatory—the only measure that would keep peace between the races. Starting in 1911, he carved up the territorial parish boundaries in the city of New Orleans, erecting six more Negro churches in less than a decade, and adding several more in the small towns surrounding the city. Blacks were now strongly encouraged to attend them.
As bad as things were in New Orleans, it was in Lafayette that Jim Crow Catholicism took its most dramatic turn. In 1912, Monsignor William Teurlings was overseeing the construction of Lafayette’s new cathedral, St. John’s. Teurlings called a meeting with his black parishioners to inquire as to where they wanted their separate pews to be located in the new church—on the side or in the back. During the debate, an older woman abruptly spoke up and told Teurlings he didn’t need to worry himself about the separate pews. Just give us our own church, she said. We want out.
Fifteen years earlier, Louisiana’s black Catholics had met the opening of a Negro parish with outrage. Now they demanded one. Teurlings consented. Upon hearing of the blacks’ desire for a separate church, the white Catholics of Lafayette gave a joyous prayer of thanks—so moved were they by the Holy Spirit that they even offered to pay for it. Blacks refused, insisting on raising the money themselves. This belonged to them. Lafayette’s first Negro parish, St. Paul’s, opened in 1912. The church was embraced and celebrated by its parishioners, for it gave them what they had never had before, a spiritual community of their own.
In the years that followed, the Diocese of Lafayette started incorporating Negro parishes throughout Acadiana. Most of the congregations were simply cleaved off from existing mixed-race ones, and this time there was nothing optional about it; baptismal records show a complete exodus of blacks from their original churches. Ultimately, thirty-five Negro churches would be established in Lafayette and in the surrounding towns of the diocese. The last opened its doors in 1962, eight years after Brown v. Board. Louisiana’s One True Church had split in two.
The “National Negro Parish” established at St. Katherine’s had been based
on an exception to the rule. But across southern Louisiana, the exception became the rule, bending it to the point where it was essentially broken. Most of the little Cajun towns around here are so small that the black parish and the white parish overlap each other geographically, both covering what should be the same territorial parish, but splitting the resident community along racial lines, thus contradicting the very definition of what a parish ought to be. In fact, there is only one place on the entire surface of planet Earth where it has ever been the consistent, deliberate policy of the Catholic Church to physically break apart territorial parishes based on the color of a man’s skin, and that is the place where I grew up.
So back to my childhood home I’ve come. It’s the first Saturday in January—the worst of Louisiana’s drizzly, lukewarm winter—and I’m headed out through the back roads and bayous of Acadiana to see if Jim Crow and Jesus Christ are still getting along. My first stop is the town of Breaux Bridge, and there they are, right as you drive up North Main Street at the center of town. First you pass St. Bernard’s (white), and just a half mile up the road is St. Francis (black). Next up is St. Martinville, with St. Martin de Tours (white) and Notre Dame (black). The town of Maurice has St. Alphonsus (white) and St. Joseph’s (black). In Carencro you’ll find St. Peter’s (white) and Our Lady of the Assumption (you get the idea). By late afternoon, I’ve driven through at least a dozen small towns, and they’re all the same. Sometimes these churches are across the tracks from one another. Sometimes they’re across the street. Sometimes they share a parking lot.
And how do you tell which is the white church and which is the black? Doesn’t take long to figure out. Some of the black churches are quite nice, but they’re always proportionally less nice than the neighboring white one. If the white church is gilded and ornate, the black church is boxy and plain. If the white church is boxy and plain, the black church is some prefab aluminum deal. And so on. To see them side by side, you can’t help but think of all those old pictures from the history books: the fancy white water fountain next to the dilapidated colored one. Only this isn’t history. It’s now.
As the sun fades, I wind my way down some back roads to the small town of Duson, right off Interstate 10. On the outskirts, I drive past St. Benedict the Moor (black, obviously), and head across the tracks to the nicer, newer St. Theresa’s, situated in the heart of Duson proper. I’d plotted my day’s itinerary to arrive here just in time for the Saturday vigil mass, attending both churches back to back, just to see. Duson had jumped out at me from the parish listings for one reason: St. Benedict’s and St. Theresa’s share the same pastor. Different buildings, opposite sides of town, but one priest? It seemed the height of absurdity.
It is. This weekend, the first after New Year’s, is the Feast of the Epiphany, and the Gospel reading from the book of Matthew tells the story of the three wise men—kings from exotic, foreign lands who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn Christ. After the Gospel reading, the priest delivers his homily. Like most homilies, this one illustrates the message of the Gospel with a little story. The priest tells us about a sculpture he once saw in a museum. The artist had molded these gaunt stick figures and arranged them all walking around in different directions. “And when you look at these figures,” the priest says, “you realize their paths are going to cross but they’re never actually going to meet. This man’s art symbolizes our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of one another’s lives.” Then the priest goes on, telling the story of the Magi and the paths they traveled and how people of all races and cultures must come together and learn to love each other through Christ. He delivers this sermon at the white church. Then, half an hour later, he drives 0.7 miles across the tracks and delivers the exact same sermon at the black church… thus symbolizing our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of one another’s lives.
At St. Benedict’s, two middle-aged white ladies are there for the black service. Curious, I follow them out to the parking lot, introduce myself, and politely inquire as to what brings them across the tracks. Hectic schedules, it turns out. They belong to St. Theresa’s, but they missed the four o’clock so they’re here to catch the five thirty. Blacks will drop in at the white church now and then for the same reason, and that’s all fine. But the bingo nights and the Bible study—the things that actually make a church a church—those are all separate, the women say.
“But does the church ever do anything to try to bring the two communities together?” I ask.
They look at me like I’m crazy. Then it starts to rain.
Driving home, and in the weeks and months following, I tried to put myself in a bit of an 1890s frame of mind, to understand the motivations of Archbishop Jaansens, and of that first black woman in Lafayette who’d stood up and said just give us our own. I could certainly empathize with how and why they made the decisions they made. Still, I had a hard time squaring their intentions with what I’d seen of Louisiana that day. Because what I’d seen, in town after town, had gone against all common sense, basic notions of equality, sound principles of bureaucratic organization, fiscal sanity, energy efficiency, the fundamentals of church law, the foundations of Catholic theology, the Gospel of Matthew, and the true meaning of Christmas.
In January of 1963, the Catholic Church convened the Conference on Religion and Race at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, an interfaith gathering of nearly a thousand clergymen from every major church in the United States. This was Catholicism’s belated attempt to bring its principles and its practice into some sort of alignment.
A steady stream of religious leaders ascended to the dais and offered up lukewarm platitudes about fostering dialogue and understanding. Then an Episcopalian theologian by the name of William Stringfellow got up to the podium and launched into a real stem-winder—if you can imagine an Episcopalian stem-winder—in which he savaged Catholics and Protestants alike for lending four hundred years of moral sanction to slavery and segregation. He pointed his finger at every last preacher in the room, including himself. They were to blame—they had done this. He derided the efforts of the conference as being “too little, too late, and too lily white.” Stringfellow’s solution? He didn’t have one. “The most practical thing to do now,” he said, “is weep.”
In 2002, the director of Black Catholic Services for the Diocese of Lafayette conducted a survey of 155 black and white church leaders from across Acadiana. The results more than justify Stringfellow’s pessimism. While everyone gave a hearty endorsement to the idea of church unity, most every response came back loaded with caveats and conditions. The racial parishes were “still necessary.” They made people “more comfortable.” The cost of change was “too great.” This is not to say that nothing has gotten better. Population shifts have closed down some parishes and opened up new ones with less rigid ethnic identities. Hispanic and Vietnamese Catholics have moved into the diocese in increasing numbers, mixing up the whole equation. And today the diocese has six black priests (up from zero), one of whom was recently named pastor at St. John’s Cathedral downtown—a first. But these changes, while significant, are happening here and there, around the margins. In town after town, separate churches are still the norm, rooted deep in the culture and permanently fixed in brick and mortar and prefab aluminum.
The Bible is pretty clear about whether you should build your church on rock or on sand. But what are you supposed to do when you’ve built your church on a mistake? Is weeping really your only practical option? Probably. But there is also the impractical option to consider as well. The impossible is always waiting for anyone who wants to give it a try.
* At the time, the Archdiocese of New Orleans encompassed all of Louisiana and Mississippi. Since then, as populations have grown, the region has been subdivided several times. The Diocese of Lafayette, comprising the core of Acadiana, was established in 1918.
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The Miracle of Grand Coteau
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nbsp; Father Charlie Thibodeaux doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d start a revolution. In a crowded room, you’d probably walk right by him without stopping. Slight of frame and unassuming, he has a quiet, gentle demeanor. Now in his eighties, Thibodeaux speaks softly, almost haltingly. Like my grandfather and other Cajuns from that generation, English was not Thibodeaux’s first language. He grew up speaking the local French patois, learning to talk American formally in school.
In 1964, Charlie Thibodeaux was a young Jesuit priest serving as an associate pastor at the Sacred Heart church in Grand Coteau. Both of the town’s churches, white and black, were run by Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus established by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534. The Jesuits are an elite body of clergymen, sometimes referred to as “God’s Marines.” Their order was founded with a unique mission to serve in higher education and work for social justice for the poor. Their aim is to improve people’s lot in this life, not just prepare their souls for the next one.
America’s Jesuits were fully complicit in condoning slavery. The order’s Maryland province owned slaves up until 1837, when the practice was formally renounced. Though some of those slaves were freed, many were actually sold to plantations, leaving a moral stain on what otherwise might have been a wholly noble reversal of conscience. Since then, however, judged on a relative scale, the order has been far more forward leaning than other religious bodies in the cause of racial equality. At Loyola University in New Orleans, Jesuit clergy were instrumental in organizing integrated student groups as early as the 1940s; Loyola also hosted the first integrated college sporting events in the state of Louisiana. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King cited only a handful of positive actions taken by the white church, one of them being the integration of the Jesuits’ Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, which admitted black students peacefully and without incident prior to Brown v. Board. It is also no accident that St. Francis Xavier, the parish at the heart of 49/63 in Kansas City, is run by Jesuits as well.
