TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071089/07108900.076

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 98 lines

RELIGION, Page 57

Black Catholics vs. the Church

Disputes in two U.S. cities dramatize a widening rift


    Since well before the Civil War, black Americans have been
predominantly Protestant. Despite extensive outreach by the Roman
Catholic Church, only 2 million of America's 54 million lay
Catholics and 300 of the nation's 19,000 priests are black.
Thirteen of 314 active Catholic bishops in the U.S. are black. The
first black archbishop, Eugene Marino, was assigned to Atlanta only
last year. Catholicism has not only had difficulty finding new
recruits in the black community, it is even beginning to lose its
grip on those few already in the fold.

    Nowhere are the problems more evident than in Detroit and
Washington, two archdioceses where the church is confronting sharp
dissatisfaction among blacks. In Washington, a fiery, articulate
black priest named George A. Stallings Jr., fed up with the
church's treatment of blacks, plans to defy James Cardinal Hickey
this week by inaugurating his own independent African-American
Catholic Congregation. In Detroit, black resentment is aimed at
Edmund Cardinal Szoka, who last week finally shut down 21 of the
city's 114 parishes, mostly in black neighborhoods, with nine
others soon to follow. The action came despite angry protests and
eleventh-hour courtroom maneuvers by both black and white
parishioners.

    For Washington Catholics, Stallings is a figure to reckon with.
During a twelve-year assignment, the 41-year-old priest built up
a black parish from 200 to 2,000 families. Last year Hickey
appointed him director of the archdiocese's evangelism program.
Heedless of Hickey's stern warnings, Stallings is determined to
celebrate Mass for his Imani (Swahili for faith) Temple, which will
meet temporarily in a chapel at Howard University. How many of the
archdiocese's 80,000 black parishioners will enlist in this
self-made Catholicism? Jacqueline Wilson, who directs the
Washington archdiocesan office for black Catholics, thinks "there
are a lot who share his concern," but expects that most will stick
with the official church. "No one," she believes, "can go off and
start up his own church and call it Roman Catholic."

    According to church law, only the diocesan bishop can authorize
a new parish or decide where priests work. In a toughly worded
response to Stallings' challenge two weeks ago, Hickey threatened
to notify all U.S. bishops that the renegade priest was no longer
in good standing and should henceforth be forbidden to speak at any
Catholic institution in the U.S. Stallings is unapologetic. "I have
been caught up in the spirit of destiny," says the rebel priest.
"I know I am breaking canon law. But to stir up the conscience of
a nation, I'll do it. When laws control, then laws enslave."

    Stallings is regarded by critics as an inveterate grandstander
whose grandiose actions could lead to his excommunication -- and
eventually a schism within the church that could spread beyond
Washington. He was recently president of the National Black
Catholic Clergy Caucus and built a nationwide following through
appearances in black parishes. He claims that he remains within the
Catholic Church but rejects its hierarchical rule, charging that
the bishops are imperialistic and the church racist. Imani Temple,
vows Stallings, "will ask the people what we should be all about."

    Catholicism, he believes, should allow experimental worship
with broader appeal to the black community, including
African-American Masses complete with recitations from black
literature. Such an African-American liturgy with an all-black
priesthood, Stallings believes, might be patterned after the
Eastern rites within the Catholic Church. He seeks to combine
"Baptist practices with the beauty and tradition of the Catholic
faith." As a young Catholic in North Carolina, Stallings often
attended an enthusiastic black Baptist church with his grandmother.
Says he: "The church is failing to bind together the church with
the needs and aspirations of African Americans."

    In the Detroit imbroglio, Cardinal Szoka threatens to shut down
another 25 parishes by next year unless offerings and memberships
increase. Though many white worshipers too are hurt by the
retrenchment, the archdiocese's 65,000 black Catholics especially
feel that the church is abandoning them. Marian Gabriel, co-chair
of a local black Catholic organization, considers Szoka's decision
"blatantly racist." Says she: "This is the most disgusting thing
I've ever run up against."

    Szoka has written movingly about the church's past failures in
ministering to blacks. But the Cardinal felt compelled to take
drastic action, in part because of Detroit's ruinous population
decline. The city's churches, however, are also dying because they
have failed to enlist any significant numbers of blacks when white
ethnics began moving out of their neighborhoods. Says the Rev.
Norman Thomas, a white priest who opposes the closings: "The church
has not done an adequate job of being a church in the city, and
that includes attracting blacks."

    Poignantly, these events are occurring just after a meeting of
the nation's bishops that endorsed a blueprint for stepped-up
evangelism among blacks. A special report to the hierarchy warned
that experts are deeply concerned about attrition among black
Catholics "leaving the church for Protestant denominations where
they will feel more at home." As developments in the two cities
indicate, the losses could just be beginning.