Black, White, and Catholic: Southern Jesuits Confront the Race Question, 1952

In the summer of 1952, the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus rejected the practice of racial segregation. Basing their decision on Catholic philosophical and theological precepts, the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province examined the racial practices of post-World War II America and found them wanting. They decided that the time had come to end segregation within their order and its various ministries. By integrating Jesuit-run educational institutions, retreat houses, and parishes as well as the religious order itself, members of the Society of Jesus, however, ran the risk of alienating benefactors, hampering apostolic effectiveness, and decreasing vocations. Nevertheless, the Jesuits had concluded that racial segregation was incompatible with church teachings regarding Christian justice and charity—"Jim Crow" Catholicism was no longer welcomed at church.¹

Jesuit action came two years before the Supreme Court rendered its decision in the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, case, and three years before the Montgomery bus boycott commenced. The process by which Southern Jesuits concluded that racial segregation was morally untenable is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the broader civil rights movement in the United States and is the focus of this work.

The history of the Roman Catholic Church's response to American racial practices has been less than edifying. Beginning with slavery and continuing with racial segregation, the Church has equivocated and rationalized the varied treatment of blacks in the United States.² While the papacy regularly condemned the slave trade, Holy Scripture, Church Fathers, and church tradition never proscribed slavery. Within three decades following the end of slavery in the United States, American Southern Catholics adopted the practice of racial segregation as it was established and institutionalized by legal and extra-legal means.³

In post-World War II America, Southern Catholics still followed the practice of segregation as prescribed by law and custom. Southern parishes were established either for black or white Catholics as were parochial grammar and high schools, Catholic medical and social establishments, and Catholic institutions of higher learning. Notable exceptions were found in the border states of Kentucky and Missouri, where several Catholic institutions of higher learning were integrated. And while the Catholic University of America, in the still largely segregated District of Columbia, accepted black applicants, none of the institutions in the Deep South did. For Southern Jesuits, the situation changed with the promulgation of a policy statement regarding interracial affairs in 1952.

The impetus for members of the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus to examine the race question came from a letter of John Baptist Janssens, S.J., the superior general of the order, entitled De Apostolatu Sociali (Concerning the Social Apostolate). Writing in October, 1949, to fellow Jesuits regarding the socio-economic and religious challenges presented by atheistic communism and liberal materialism, Janssens worried that Jesuits were not sufficiently aware of the plight of the working class and the threat this posed to an individual's material and spiritual welfare arising from "the inequitable condition, both temporal and spiritual, of by far the greater part of the human race."⁴ The Society of Jesus, he believed, needed to demonstrate solidarity with workers if Christianity was to have any impact on their lives; if not, the appeal of secular doctrines would draw them away from the Church and Christian values.

For Janssens, Christ's love was the motivating factor for examining and then changing society. "Christ, in an untold number of His members, still suffers hunger, nakedness, exile and contempt. Let us turn our eyes attentively to sights which daily meet our eyes and, in the light of truth, study conditions to which we have grown accustomed and even indifferent. They must not be tolerated; there must be a change." The superior general of the Jesuits rhetorically asked whether it was right that people all over the world should live in...