Gulf Pine Catholic

10 Gulf Pine Catholic • April 20, 2018 Bishop Gerow kept an extensive file including this and many other ra- cial incidents, mindful that he was an actor in an important chapter in both Catholic and American history. The file contains many similar stories of black Catholics being harassed by white parishioners over the years. Taken together, these tragic stories, as well as the Bishop’s reflections on them in his diary, show him trying to navigate this period of escalating ra- cial tension while remaining focused on the moral imperative of creating pastoral structures that serve all God’s children. In one entry from November 1957, he shares the advice he gave to a group of Catholic men who were distressed at the ill treatment of black parishioners. He wrote: “We are facing a situ- ation in which we, as a small minor- ity, are up against a frantic and unrea- sonable attitude of a greater majority of the community. If we attempt to force matters we are liable to do in- jury not only to ourselves but also to those whom we would wish to do help, namely, the Negroes. Imprudent action on our part might cause them very serious even physical harm. Therefore, we must be very careful in what we do. His position on desegregation was a delicate one, which attempted to balance a complex array of factors and forces: 1. First, there were the pastoral needs of black Catholics in the region, some of whom had to travel to cele- brate the sacraments and who some- times faced verbal or physical threats. 2. Second, there were the estab- lished parishes comprised mostly of whites, themselves a minority in a region that was dominated by Protes- tants. 3. Third, there were men in both state and local government, not to mention law enforcement, who were sometimes hostile even to white Catholics, and so the presence of blacks in Catholic congregations was a fur- ther potential danger. 4. Fourth, there were a growing number of organiza- tions supporting the cause of integration: those in orga- nizations like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as Catholic organiza- tions like the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice. Bishop Gerow was not alone in his concern to find the right way to integrate Catholic institutions, but he faced ambivalence both within and outside his diocese. In 1958, the National Catholic Welfare Conference -- a Bishop Gerow From page 3 precursor to today’s United States Conference of Cath- olic Bishops -- issued a statement, “Discrimination and Christian Conscience.” Some historians argue that the bishops’ statement was slow to be issued and not forceful enough in its stance toward desegregation. Nonetheless, it provides valuable insight into the Catholic Church’s growing moral convictions on the problem of segregation. Addressing the question of enforced segregation, the document asks, “Can enforced segregation be rec- onciled with the Christian view of our fellow man? In our judgment it cannot….” It offers two reasons: first, segregation makes one group inferior to another; and second, it leads to the denial of basic human rights of blacks. It closes with an exhortation to act now to “seize the mantle of leadership from the agitator and the racist,” but stops short of rec- ommending specific actions. Two years after the bishops’ state- ment, Mathew Ahmann, the founder and executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ), and later one of the organizers of the March on Washing- ton, wrote a piece in Commonweal (12/2/1960), “Catholics and Race,” placing the bishops’ statement in the larger context of the race question in the United States. He points to 45 Catholic interracial groups in the United States dedicated to desegrega- tion and to addressing housing dis- crimination. In the South, he reports, the previous year showed that only six (6) percent of African American students were in integrated schools. In Mississippi, moreover, there were none. He highlights the fact that just prior to and after Brown v. Board , Catholics had taken the lead in integration, cit- ing the examples such as Archbishop Joseph Ritter of Saint Louis, who had begun desegregating Catholic schools in 1947 (threatening excommunica- tion to any who protested). Ahmann goes on to lament that “Catholic activ- ity in the interracial movement in the South has in recent years all but come to a halt.” Nor was the situation much better in the North, where discrimina- tory housing practices impacted many black migrants from the South. It was Ahmann’s NCCIJ col- league Henry Cabirac, Jr. who began to force the hand of Bishop Gerow, when Cabirac called for integration of schools at meetings in Mississippi City in the middle of 1963. Respond- ing to Cabirac’s advocacy that black families apply for admission to white Catholic schools, Gerow wrote in his diary of July 1 the following: “My point is this: School integration is going to come in the course of time, but at present we are not ready for it. I feel that the first step is to create a better relationship between the two races, and to accomplish this I have written to the pastors of the Diocese that they have several sermons on the race question in their church and have offered to give them sermon outlines to guide them, the purpose of this being to create a realiza- tion that we are all children of God and that the colored have certain God-given rights many of which they have been deprived of in years past.” Mississippi Bishop Oliver Gerow is pictured in this 1960 photo with members of Pax Christi in Greenwood, Miss. Bishop Gerow, head of the Diocese of Jackson, MS, from 1924 to 1967, steered Catholics in the state through some of the darkest days of the civil rights movement. He released a statement urging lawmakers to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson July 2 of that year. CNS photo/courtesy Diocese of Jackson Archives) SEE BILOXI GEROW, PAGE 11 Bishop Richard Gerow at his desk. Photo/Diocese of Jackson Archives