Laïcs En Mission
Black Catholicism Newsbriefs
The Tablet The annual Mass of Thanksgiving in Celebration of Black History Month was put on by the Diocese of Brooklyn Vicariate of Black Catholic Concerns and the Diocese of Rockville Centre Office of Multicultural Diversity. Read more….
PROSPECT HEIGHTS — On Oct. 29, 1853, Harriet Thompson took pen to paper, wrote a letter to the pope, and started a fight for equality for blacks in the Catholic Church. Thompson, a black woman living in Lower Manhattan, was unhappy with the treatment she and her fellow African Americans were receiving not only from …
WASHINGTON — Two Catholic Churches are among 35 black religious sites around the country receiving grant money to help with renovations and building preservation. St. Rita Catholic Church in Indianapolis and the Basilica of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Norfolk, Virginia, are both receiving grants from the “Preserving Black Churches” program of the …
PEACE & JUSTICE A U.S. CATHOLIC INTERVIEW Published February 1, 2023 Ansel Augustine is director of the Office of Black Catholic Ministries for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. “Can the church we love, love us back?” asks Ansel Augustine in the subtitle to his new book, Leveling the Praying Field. Despite document after document on …
March 16, 2022 My entire career has been about ending the erasure of Black Catholics from academic and public discourse. A refrain I’ve heard throughout my career across religious and racial lines is “I didn’t know there were any Black Catholics.” After more than 20 years of doing this work, this refrain persists despite the …
The story of how Roman Catholics “became American” is very well-known. Beginning in the 19th century, Catholics were a feared and despised immigrant population that Protestants imagined to be inimical to, even incompatible with, everything America was meant to be. American mobs burned Catholic convents and churches. By the early 20th century, the anti-Catholic Ku …
WASHINGTON (CNS)—During a Feb. 22 evening program on CNN, Washington Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory offered a prayer for those who have died from Covid-19 asking God to “grant eternal peace to all our sisters and brothers lost to this disease.” “Let us now open our hearts to recall those who have died from the coronavirus,” …
WINDSOR TERRACE — Anthropologist Tom Riley did not understand why his grandmother, in the mid 1950s, resisted an interview with a priest working on a biography of the family’s famous ancestor, Bishop James Augustine Healy. Bishop Healy — the eldest brother of Riley’s great-grandmother, Martha — was born into slavery in Jones County, Georgia. He …
What does it mean to be black & Catholic? It means I come to my Church, FULLY FUNCTIONING. That doesn’t frighten you does it? I come to my Church fully functioning, I bring myself; my black self. All that I am. All that I have. All that I hope to become. My traditions, my experience, …
Western Christianity is fundamentally African, in the way that Eastern Christianity is fundamentally Greek. Most Eastern churches — whether they worship in Romanian, Bulgarian, or Old Slavonic — recognize that their ritual and devotional forms largely come from fourth-century Constantinople, where the liturgy was rendered in Greek. Western churches will acknowledge that their own roots …