Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871--1960

Excellent book to study the emergence of Black priest in America.

In this book, Stephen Ochs has given a wonderfully informative history of an important aspect of African-American religious history: the struggle between 1871-1960 to include black priests in the Catholic Church. Ochs begins by noting (using 1988 figures) that there are thirteen Afro-American Roman Catholic bishops, with three hundred priests, and 1.5 million black Catholics in this country (about 2% of the total). However, the struggle to reach this position began with the experiences of St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, known as the "Josephites," who were "the lone Roman Catholic clerical society of priests and brothers devoted exclusively to ministry in the Afro-American community." Ochs notes that "Before the arrival of the Mill Hill Fathers, the church had basically failed in its mission to Afro-Americans. Successive waves of Catholic European immigration throughout the nineteenth century had taxed church resources to the limit and left few priests and sisters available for work among blacks." The first black priests in this country were three brothers, who were all born slaves in the 1830s to an Irishman named Michael Morris Healy, who had ten children in a monogamous relationship with one of his black slaves named Mary Eliza (it would have been illegal for them to have married, of course). Their oldest son, James Augustine Healy, was ordained for the diocese of Boston, and eventually was made the second bishop of Portland, Maine. Unfortunately, "Healy identified more with his Irish heritage and his French training than with his Afro-American background." Later, "On December 19, 1891, the six-foot-two-inch tall seminarian (Charles Uncles) became the first black man ordained in the United States." Ochs covers many areas of fact, such as that Xavier University in New Orleans is "America's only Catholic black university." He also notes that some of the friends of the movement for black priests weren't black themselves: "During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the cause of black priests in the Catholic Church had no greater champion than the Reverend John R. Slattery." Ochs also takes note of some intra-group squabbles, such as "the feud between the Josephites and the Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics," and the later "rupture in the Federated Colored Catholics." This is a fascinating and much-needed book that will be ESSENTIAL READING for Catholics, black Catholics, anyone interested in African-American religion, or African-American studies in general.