The Catholic Encounter with Race

The vast majority of European immigrants arrived in this country with a strong sense of ethnic identity; but the idea of race and color, of white versus black, was not yet a part of their world. They were Irish or German, Polish or Italian, and visibly proud of their heritage. They established ethnic villages in the midst of urban America that were reminiscent of the Old World, and developed a spirit of nationalism associated with the land of their birth that was hardly visible when they had lived in their countries of origin. Not long after their arrival in the United States these immigrants also adopted an identity as white Americans. Recent studies have highlighted how immigrant groups, the Irish in particular, became white. ¹ In becoming white many immigrants adopted the racist attitudes of the white American majority, and bitter antipathies developed between some of these white ethnic groups and the black American community.

Large numbers of these European immigrants were Catholics. They belonged to a church that preached a gospel of universalism and claimed as its members people of all cultures and colors. Yet, during the course of the nineteenth century, clerical leaders in the Catholic church in the United States, like the people in the pew, adopted the racist attitudes of the white American majority. As a result American Catholicism became a Jim Crow church. Well into the twentieth century, its parishes, schools, colleges, seminaries, and religious orders of priests and nuns remained racially segregated. By the 1960s, however, many Catholic clergy and laity were in the vanguard of the civil rights movement and stood side by side with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates as they marched in Selma and Chicago; the Catholic church was no longer a racially segregated institution.

Two very different studies, the books of David W. Southern and John T. McGreevy seek to explain how this change took place. Southern’s biographical study of John LaFarge, S.J. (1880–1963) examines his work in race relations. McGreevy focuses on American Catholics, examining “the threads connecting religion, race, and community in the nation’s northern cities” in the twentieth century (p. 3). Because African Americans never comprised more than 2 percent of the Catholic population, there was not much interest in their history among professional historians. This has changed in the past twenty-five years as more historians have sought to uncover a rich history that began in the colonial era of slavery. In 1990, for example, Cyprian Davis, an African-American Benedictine monk, wrote the first comprehensive history of African-American Catholics, incorporating much of the recent research into his study. ² The works of Southern and McGreevy will not only enrich our understanding of race relations in the Catholic community, but will also help readers to appreciate more fully the role of religion in the history of race relations in twentieth-century America.

John LaFarge was a pioneer in the history of race relations in the United States. The son of a famous artist, he was born into an aristocratic milieu in Newport, Rhode Island. After graduating from Harvard, he decided to become a priest and entered the religious order known as the Jesuits. In 1911 his superiors sent him to do pastoral work in the black Catholic community in southern Maryland. After fifteen years there, he moved to New York City (where he remained until his death in 1963) and began a distinguished career as a writer and editor of the influential Jesuit journal, America.

LaFarge was an intellectual who used his position at America as a pulpit to preach on behalf of racial justice. Grounding his interracial philosophy in the Catholic social gospel tradition, he believed that blacks had the same natural rights as whites and...