Search
-
March 19, 2019LOS ANGELES – William King knew he wanted to be a priest since he was 4 years old.
He traces the decision to one of his childhood priests, Father Greg Chisholm, a Jesuit who once served as pastor of Holy Name of Jesus Church in Jefferson Park, Calif. Like King, Chisholm is African American, and seeing him in this role planted the idea that he, too, could become a priest.
When King was in high school, another African American priest, Father Allan Roberts, the late pastor of Saint Bernadette Church, took him under his wing and nurtured this vocation.
King, 22, aspired to be like them – strong preachers, personable and good caretakers of their parishes – and their presence proved to him that priesthood was a viable path for African Americans. So, after graduating high school in 2015, he entered Juan Diego House, a seminary for men aiming to become priests for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“It made a huge impact to know that black men like myself could be in a role that’s predominantly seen as white or Latino – and that I could do it well,” he said.
But, his experience is not the norm. Many black men in Los Angeles have never known an African American priest, and vocation stories like King’s are becoming increasingly rare.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles – the nation’s most diverse Catholic diocese, where worship and ministry happen in more than 40 languages – has ordained only one U.S.-born African American priest in its 82-year history.
Roberts, King’s mentor, became the first African American priest ordained by the archdiocese in 1980, but since his death in 2016, Los Angeles has had no African American diocesan priests.
While black priests have served in the city as part of religious orders, and African-born priests have headed diocesan parishes, Los Angeles has long been missing African American priests to minister to the estimated 150,000 black Catholics in the area.
“It’s the reality of many of our dioceses,” said Father Stephen Thorne, a priest with the National Black Catholic Congress. “I believe that God has called black men to the priesthood in the Catholic Church, so it’s not about the call. It’s that we have not done our best to recruit them and to sustain that vocation.”
The underrepresentation of African Americans in the priesthood is nothing new, said Matthew Cressler, author of the 2017 book, “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic.”
Even though Catholics of African descent have been in the Americas “for as long as there have been Catholics in the Americas,” he said, the Church has long resisted their presence in the clergy.
The first priests of African descent in the U.S. passed for white, and it wasn’t until 1886 that the United States had an openly black priest. Even then, it wasn’t because American Catholics had accepted racial equality in the clergy.
Augustus Tolton – who was born to enslaved parents – applied to seminaries across the country with the help of an Irish priest he had been studying with in Illinois, Cressler said. But, no seminary would accept him because he was black, so he instead had to study in Rome, where he was eventually ordained. (Tolton’s cause for sainthood is now in process.)
“The institutional Church for the majority of its history has acted as most white-dominated institutions did, which is that they barred ordination, education and even encouraging of black vocations,” said Cressler, who is also an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
It wasn’t until the mid-20 th century that black priests were ordained in larger numbers in the United States, Cressler said. But, many black men still faced significant obstacles to get there, including harassment and hostility from fellow seminarians.
Others were diverted away from diocesan seminaries and toward missionary orders that catered specifically to African Americans, such as the Society of the Divine Word and Saint Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart – a process Cressler called a “siloing of black vocations.”
And, when the United States faced a priest shortage, Cressler said, many churches brought in priests from the Global South. So, while African American vocations remain low, the number of African-born priests has risen.
Today, of the 3 million African American Catholics living in the United States, only eight are active bishops, 250 are priests, and 75 are seminarians in formation for the priesthood, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“We are still reckoning with the inheritances of this long tradition where, for most of its history in the United States – really up until the last half-century or so – the Catholic Church was recognized to be the providence of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of European immigrants,” Cressler said.
For many African American men, these dynamics can be a deterrent to entering the seminary, King said. He was able to endure these challenges with the support of a network of black priests across the country.
His mentor, Roberts, died during his first year at Juan Diego House, so he had to look beyond Los Angeles for guidance from other African American priests who understood what he was going through.
“Having them in my corner really gave me a sense of hope,” he said.
But, these and other incidents weighed on King, and a year-and-a-half into his formation he decided to leave. It was a combination of factors, he said – personal, spiritual, academic – as well as a realization that the seminary was no longer a good fit for his goals. So, in 2016 he withdrew from Juan Diego House.
The impact of not having a single African American priest belonging to the archdiocese is profound, black Catholic leaders in Los Angeles said.
Solving the African American priest shortage will require efforts from both the community and the archdiocese, leaders said.
The first step, they said, is recognizing – and honoring – African American culture throughout the Church.
A model is in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which established an Office for Black Catholics in 1979, and recently launched a campaign aimed at recruiting young men and women into religious life. The archdiocese currently has three African American diocesan priests and one seminarian.
Father Richard N. Owens, Philadelphia’s director of the Office for Black Catholics, said the new initiative identifies young African American men who might be interested in the priesthood, and hosts a series of events to provide them support and educate the broader community about the history of Catholicism in the African American community.
After King left the seminary in 2016, he started working for a stained-glass artist who creates windows for churches and hospitals in Los Angeles. The experience broadened his horizons and brought him closer to God, he said.
But, stepping away from seminary also made clear to him that he needed to return.
So, last year, he re-applied and was accepted into seminary – but not to a seminary with the archdiocese. Instead, he is now with Saint Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart – commonly known as the Josephites – a nationwide religious order that specifically ministers to African Americans.
By joining the Josephites, he said, he’s guaranteed to serve African Americans and to help revive the black Catholic community – missions he said he feels called to do.
“Pope Paul VI said to the sons and daughters of Africa, ‘Give your gifts of blackness to the Church,’ on one of his papal visits,” he said. “We’re trying to give our gifts of blackness to the Church – our roots, our heritage, our culture, our way of worship.”
Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil is a freelance writer and graduate of Harvard Divinity School.
Photo: Faithful attend the 8th annual African American Catholic Ancestral Mass at St. Odilia Church in South Los Angeles on Nov. 10. Photo John McCoy.
