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July 16, 2023By Carole Norris Greene, OSV News
If I could bottle certain memories to share for inspiration, I’d choose recollections of those times I spent with the nation’s Black priests, sisters and seminarians during their joint national gatherings, beginning for me in the early 1980s.
I’d give a dose to those at the upcoming XIII National Black Catholic Congress July 20-23 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor. They will be representative of the nation’s 3 million Black Catholics.
Congress XIII participants can take heart from the consecrated men and women who for decades courageously spoke truth to power as they called for the inclusion of the cultural contributions of Black Catholics to the Catholic Church during those troubling times before the Baltimore-based National Black Catholic Congress Inc. was established.
They may be surprised to know it was a layman who first suggested that the national Black Catholic congresses held between 1889 and 1894 be resumed. Laurence Payne of Houston, a former seminarian, was vicar of urban affairs for the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, when he and other directors of diocesan offices of Black ministry, myself included, were meeting in Techny, Ill., in the mid-1980s. He asked what we thought about reviving the congresses. We all agreed that for such a massive undertaking to happen, the nation’s Black bishops were needed to lead the call. They did, with great enthusiasm and ownership.
In the 1980s, I was privileged to coordinate media for the annual joint gatherings of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, established in Detroit in 1968; the National Black Sisters’ Conference, which followed that same year; and the National Black Catholic Seminarians Association, formed in 1970.
There was something about the reverent hush that pervaded the room when they assembled for Mass. Many participants were the only Black members of their communities. I believe it was in their collective woundedness that they found healing, and the will to continue challenging their church to embrace the cultural contributions of African Americans who proudly and tenaciously held onto their Catholic faith.
The joy participants radiated when they saw each other was palpable. They had their stellar poet in Marist Brother Cyprian Lamar Rowe, then director of the National Office of Black Catholics, where I too was on staff as editor in chief of Impact!, the organization’s national newspaper. I also coordinated media in 1987 for the historic Congress VI and was present in the fall of that year when Pope John Paul II gave a special audience to Black Catholic leaders in New Orleans. In addition, I helped cover Congress X in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2007.
Attendees at those early joint conferences were electrified when their Sister Thea Bowman took to the stage singing and laughing but also seriously reminding them of how precious they are to God, and of their duty to combat racial injustice. They knew they had the best when their own Father Cyprian Davis, a Benedictine monk and highly regarded historian, stepped forward to articulate the history of Black Catholics in the United States. Social Service Sister Eva Marie Lumas, who coined the phrase “heroes and she-roes,” still speaks for them when she said she was not the only one determined to keep on going – “learning as we go from honest self-reflection, candid conversation and deep listening with trusted mentors.”
So many of these outstanding men and women have gone to be with the Lord, but several are still with us. We may yet still have time to sit at their feet and learn and to say thank you for being able to stand on their shoulders.