Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  In 1962, the Roman Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council, an effort to bring the church’s doctrine more in line with modernity. Of the many reforms that were made, one was a directive to engage the laity directly in working to implement Christ’s teachings for the poor and underprivileged—like the Jesuits, laboring for social justice as opposed to giving to charity. Just as the church was reaching out into the outside world, it also asked parishes to bring the outside world into the church. Vatican II encouraged local congregations to take the standard Roman liturgy and, where appropriate, embroider it with cultural folkways and traditions—whether African, European, or Cajun—making the churchgoing experience more accessible and meaningful to people of different nationalities. As a result, many young priests who came out of seminary in this era were steeped in the ideology of social change. While the old bishops were trying to stall Martin Luther King in Birmingham, the new kids were out marching with him in Selma. They may have been men of the cloth, but they were still the children of the sixties.

  Charlie Thibodeaux wasn’t in church the day Wallace Belson was assaulted. He heard about it from the police shortly thereafter. But he went straight to his superiors and threatened to quit if measures weren’t taken. “Either they go, or I go,” he said. That same week, Thibodeaux visited the homes of the men who’d committed the assault, demanding an apology before they would be allowed back at mass. Both men were visibly nervous and ashamed—though most of their guilt stemmed from knowing they’d disrespected the church, rather than any sudden stirrings of racial tolerance. Both men quickly admitted to being in the wrong, but tried to rationalize their actions just the same.

  “They said he was drunk,” Thibodeaux says.

  Belson was known in Grand Coteau as a man who enjoyed his drink; his struggles with the bottle were no secret. One of the assailants, perversely, tried to claim that he got on well with Belson, was friendly with him. On a recent winter night, the man said, he’d come across Belson lying in the road, inebriated and half frozen, and had helped carry him home to safety. But for a black man to enter the white church? In that kind of state? That was something else. Whether or not Belson had actually been drinking that morning no one can say with any certainty. “But even if he was drunk,” Thibodeaux points out, “that’s no reason to jump him.”

  After the beating of Wallace Belson, Thibodeaux decided that healing the town’s racial divide was the mission to which God had called him. Two Sundays later, he took to the pulpit at Sacred Heart and gave what would be the first of many spirited sermons on the matter. “I laid a little Matthew 25 on ’em,” Thibodeaux says. “‘Whatsoever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you do to me.’ I told them if Christ came into this church, and Christ was black, you’d be rejecting him, rejecting Christ.” The image of Jesus Christ as a black man didn’t exactly go over with the all-white congregation. “By the time I was done,” Thibodeaux says, “you could have heard a pin drop.”

  Charlie Thibodeaux grew up as “the least of these” himself. Poor, one of nine children on a small family farm in nearby Carencro, he was out in the fields at the age of four, picking cotton side by side with the day-laboring blacks who came to work the farm. They were always welcome in his family’s home, he recalls. Those who knew him say he was more at ease among blacks than he ever was around the more sophisticated, well-heeled whites at Sacred Heart. When I first spoke to Thibodeaux, it was via a spotty phone connection from the San Ignacio mission in Asunción, Paraguay, where he has lived and worked among the poor for the last thirty years.

  From the spring of 1964 onward, the young priest kept up his crusade. He preached and preached, week after week. He even waded into local politics, openly campaigning against the formation of a local White Citizens’ Council. For a long time, the only measurable effect of Charlie Thibodeaux’s actions was a net increase in the hatred of Charlie Thibodeaux. Whenever he said mass, pictures of monkeys and racist cartoons were passed up in the collection plate. The cars outside church were leafleted with flyers from white supremacy groups. Eventually, the parish had to call the town marshal to stand guard in the parking lot during services. Reports began to circulate that the young priest would be beaten himself, or killed. Phone calls came to the rectory late at night with empty, ominous silence on the other end. Finally, a group of white parishioners tried to hit the church where it had always been vulnerable in the past: withholding their weekly tithe from the collection plate. Thibodeaux dismissed the threat out of hand. “This isn’t a club,” he told them. For six years, the priest did not let up, but nothing really changed, either. One or two black parishioners would attend mass at Sacred Heart here and there, and there was no more violence. But the root problem remained: Grand Coteau had two churches where there should have been only one.

  Your average Catholic will throw an unholy temper tantrum if the priest moves the ten o’clock mass to ten thirty, never mind use the entire church as a racial experiment. So as much as Father Thibodeaux argued for acceptance of blacks in the white church, the one thing he never proposed was to make the black church and the white church into one church. Because who would be crazy enough to suggest something like that? Churches aren’t water fountains. You can’t just tear them down. Sacred Heart was the gilded trophy of the white community. Christ the King was the humble heart of the black community. To reconcile that division and make them whole would require a miracle. Fortunately, this was Grand Coteau, and Grand Coteau is the kind of place where miracles can happen.

  Literally. If you believe in that sort of thing.

  In 1821, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart arrived here to build a convent and to establish what would become one of the finest all-girls Catholic preparatory schools in the region. In October of 1866, a young postulant (think Maria in The Sound of Music) arrived at the convent and soon fell terribly ill. For weeks she suffered. Unable to eat, she wasted away to nothing. Her skin became purple with bruises. She was eventually given last rites and holy communion, during which she convulsed violently and then collapsed lifeless on the bed. The nuns left her body in repose to await burial. Then, inexplicably, just an hour later, she was awake and walking about, every trace of her illness gone. The Miracle of Grand Coteau, as it came to be known, was the first documented, authenticated miracle ever to take place in the United States of America.

  It would be disingenuous to depict Grand Coteau as some little ol’ Southern town where white folks and black folks had a chat with Jesus and then tried to patch things up. It’s not. It’s a company town. The Miracle of Grand Coteau made it a Catholic pilgrimage site; thousands travel here every year for spiritual retreats. Soon after the Sacred Heart sisters came, the Jesuits founded a neighboring men’s school, St. Charles College, and took over pastoral duties at the St. Charles Borromeo parish, which would later have its name changed to the Church of the Sacred Heart. Today there’s also St. John Berchmans school for boys, the Our Lady of the Oaks retreat center, and a Jesuit novitiate, training young men for the priesthood.

  Some years ago, a local priest was asked what the main industry of Grand Coteau was. He replied, “The main industry of Grand Coteau is religion.” Sitting just a stone’s throw from the Chevron station and the Popeyes chicken on Interstate 49, the Catholic campus at the heart of town feels as if it belongs to another world and time, with languid live oak trees that hang over crumbling gothic cemeteries. It’s easy to see where the town gets its nickname: people call it the Holy Land of South Louisiana.

  All of which is to say that the Catholic Church holds an extra bit of sway in this town. And because the parish here is run by the Jesuits, it has a certain autonomy from the local diocese and from local politics. With that autonomy, the Jesuits decided to do something. Six years of Charlie Thibodeaux’s sermonizing had accomplished nothing. In the summer of 1970, the priests of Grand Coteau finally arrived at the obvious: so long as the church itself maintained separate and unequal parishes, its moral authority to condemn racial
prejudice was hollow. The Word had to be made flesh. The two churches had to become one.

  In selecting a priest to oversee the parish unification, Father Thibodeaux was passed over. He was too young, and had stirred up too much ill will. The Jesuit provincial felt that an outsider was necessary to bring an objective, neutral presence to the endeavor. Father David Knight was an up-and-coming Jesuit with big ideas about changing the world. Ordained in 1961, he’d spent three years as a missionary among the Ngama tribe in Chad, after which he enrolled in a doctoral program at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. That’s where he was, wrapping up his dissertation, when he got the call from Grand Coteau.

  Father Knight was not the first choice for the job, either. Fourteen different priests had been offered the position. All had turned it down. Knight just happened to be next on the list. “The provincial called me up,” Knight says, “and he told me they wanted to integrate these two parishes because it was getting to be a disgrace—those weren’t his words, but that’s what he meant.” Father Knight’s demeanor was as brash and forthright as Thibodeaux’s was quiet and unassuming. Knight is the kind of man who actually calls a disgrace a disgrace, when everyone down South knows you’re supposed to call it a delicate situation. “I felt that integration was a big priority for the church,” he says of his reason for taking the job nobody wanted. “And I’d just gotten out of college. What else was I going to do?”

  In August of 1970, Knight joined Thibodeaux and two other priests in a group ministry that would serve both congregations at Sacred Heart and Christ the King, with the ultimate aim of bringing them together. The first step, the team felt, should be a symbolic one. That November, they wrote to Lafayette bishop Maurice Schexnayder, asking him to dissolve the existing black and white parishes and unify them, canonically, into one. The act of physically integrating the congregations would follow, but this would serve as a signal that change was coming and it was real. The bishop wrote back that their request would be granted. While the paperwork was going through, they should proceed as if it were a done deal.

  Most everyone knows the biblical story of King Solomon. Two women came to him, each claiming to be the rightful mother of an infant. In his wisdom, Solomon told them simply to cut the baby in half, knowing that the true mother would reveal herself by agreeing to forfeit the child rather than see it chopped in two. It was in this spirit of Solomonic compromise that Knight’s ministry moved forward. At the outset, the Sunday congregations themselves weren’t called on to do anything. The pastors moved slowly with small, deliberate gestures. The first thing to integrate was the church bulletin; instead of wasting paper printing two, all the weekly news was condensed into one. A few weeks later, the ministers shut off the separate rectory phone numbers and replaced them with a single extension that rang to a central parish office.

  Next came the church letterhead, which would seem to be an item of minor consequence, but it forced the priests to decide on a new name for this amalgamated parish while it waited to be officially unified. They had the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the one hand, and Christ the King on the other. Since “Jesus” and “Christ” were handily interchangeable, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Christ the King now became the Church of the Sacred Heart of Christ the King. Cumbersome, but guaranteed not to leave anyone out. By the end of 1970, an integrated bingo night had started up as well. Confessions and baptisms were held at Sacred Heart one week and at Christ the King the next. One for me, one for you.

  Emboldened by the changes of the era, both in Grand Coteau and out in the larger world, younger black parishioners began asserting their right to be at “the big church.” Julia Richard was a high school senior in the fall of 1970. Once the doors of Sacred Heart were open, she started going to regular Sunday mass there, just to show that she could. “I marched right up to the front,” she says. “I wasn’t going to sit in the back.”

  When she marched in, however, many whites blocked the entrance to their pews, or simply got up and left. If they allowed her to sit, they’d refuse to shake her hand when offered the sign of peace. That kind of hostility was common. Many of the older blacks chose not to go at all. If they did, they sat in the back or in the side chapel that had been the designated colored section back before blacks had their own church. Richard’s grandmother, for one, wouldn’t sit in any pew in the white church at all. “She would just stand in the back for the whole mass,” Richard says, “even with empty seats.”

  Knight and his team followed their administrative changes by putting a new mass on the schedule: the Global Village Mass. It would be a voluntary service for those parishioners in favor of integration, a place where no one would walk out or refuse to shake your hand. In true Solomonic spirit, it was held at both churches on alternating Sundays. “That was the best, and best attended, mass of the week,” Knight recalls. “Everyone was there because they wanted to be there. And there were lots of white people who came, too. The singing was wonderful. It worked.”

  Through the winter months, integration moved slowly, haltingly forward. On March 14, 1971, ninety-seven children, almost evenly split between black and white, received their first communion together—the first time such a thing had ever been done. The congregation was “a little stiff at the beginning,” Knight observed at the time, “but by the end of mass the atmosphere was one of relaxation and joy.” He called it “a sign of progress and a symbol of the future.”

  The future arrived five days later, when Bishop Schexnayder issued an open letter to the people of Grand Coteau formally dissolving the twin parishes of Sacred Heart and Christ the King and declaring them to be “one parish in the eyes of God and of His Holy Church.” Giving a nod to Louisiana’s checkered history, the bishop wrote that “the adoption of separate churches for whites and blacks proved practical if not genuinely Catholic. [But] for more generations than we had hoped, this procedure continued unchanged. In the light of a greater awareness of the teachings of Christ, we see not only the advisability but the necessity of correcting a system which can no longer endure.”

  No opposition to the bishop’s decree was voiced by either congregation, black or white, a stark contrast to Charlie Thibodeaux’s efforts of just a few years prior. “The whites showed a respect for the bishop that I frankly hadn’t expected,” Knight says. Within a matter of weeks, the two parish councils had merged—six black members and six white. Together they began to hammer out the nuts and bolts of forging a single, integrated community: pooling the parish finances, setting a new mass schedule, and, most important, deciding on a permanent name. The Church of the Sacred Heart of Christ the King didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

  After some deliberation, it was decided that the new name should be the old name: St. Charles Borromeo, as the parish had originally been called in 1819. Charles Borromeo had served as the bishop of Milan during the Counter-Reformation of the 1500s, a period in which the Church of Rome attempted to right itself from the corruption and decadence that had sparked the Protestant Reformation. It was Borromeo’s reforms, in large part, that brought corruption under control and helped lift the church out of the Dark Ages—an apt symbol for a community trying to begin anew.

  With the bishop’s decree and the adoption of the new name, Knight and his fellow pastors had only one final obstacle to face: the impossible one. Where Grand Coteau once had two churches in two parishes, it now had two churches in one parish, a problem that would stump Solomon himself. This was not a single baby to be cut in half. Here you had two babies, each one near and dear to the hearts of those who claimed it, and one of them simply had to go.

  If churches were water fountains, there wouldn’t be any argument over which one to keep: you keep the better one. Sacred Heart, by almost every measure, was better. Better constructed, better facilities, bigger parking lot, and so on. And Christ the King, with two-thirds the seating capacity, could never under any scenario accommodate both congregations. Objectively, there was no choice to be m
ade. But objectivity has a hard time trumping sentimentality. If anything, the “lesser” black church possessed greater spiritual value; it had been the only community its congregants had ever known. Once it became clear that the smaller church was going to come out on the losing end, many black parishioners were suddenly more reluctant than the whites. Christ the King was theirs. Having already lost so much, why should they be the ones to give something up?

  Knight took counsel and testimony from both sides and then wrote a letter to the parish council, attempting to negotiate a middle path. Whites, he ventured, were opposed to integration in theory, their fears driven largely by false and imaginary preconceptions of blacks. Once integration proved those preconceptions wrong, white opposition would fade over time. Blacks, however, were opposed to integration in reality. Their fears were all too real: the fear of being assaulted, of being denigrated. Integration had always come with painful costs, like the loss of historically black schools. Therefore, Knight reasoned, the blacks’ attachment to their building wasn’t really about the building. “What they are concerned about,” he wrote, “is their position in the new community that is about to be formed. Are they being asked to ‘give up’ their building as a sign that they are also giving up the sense of identity, leadership, and parish life that they have found in Christ the King? If so, they will not give up their building.”