PERSPECTIVES
Black Consciousness in the Church Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
In 1993, Benedictine Fr. Cyprian Davis sat down with the editors of U.S. Catholic Magazine to talk about Black Catholic history and the future of Blacks in the Catholic Church. The interview was reprinted in October 2020. Excerpts from it are below.
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HOW LONG HAVE BLACK CATHOLICS BEEN IN THE UNITED STATES? Black Catholics arrived with the Spaniards in Florida in the 16th century. There is an article in the American Historical Review that looks at an event known as the Stono Rebellion in Georgia in the 1700s. Some of the slaves who rebelled in that incident had come from the Congo region, part of what is now Angola. The writer hypothesizes that these slaves considered themselves Catholic. The Congo became Catholic in the 15th century, when the king, Alphonso the Good, converted to Catholicism. After they conquered the area, the Portuguese had converted many Congo natives to Catholicism, so there was definitely a Catholic tradition in the area. Later there were many Blacks in Maryland and Louisiana who were traditionally Catholic because the Jesuits evangelized them there. But we don’t know for certain how many African slaves might already have been Catholics because the study of the Catholic Church in Africa is still going on. WERE THERE ANY BLACK RELIGIOUS ORDERS EARLY ON IN AMERICA? Yes, there were the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Holy Family Sisters. The Black women who joined these orders became in a sense “super nuns” to prove themselves to all the people who were asking, “Can they make it? Can they do it?” For that reason they became very conscious of the demand that they always do better than everyone else. Much of their expression was less African American than I think would have been the case otherwise. WERE CATHOLICS PART OF THE ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT? The abolitionists opposed slavery on moral grounds and were very religious, well-educated people from 8
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establishment backgrounds. Yet many had an intellectual disdain for the Catholic Church. They saw Catholics as lower-class immigrants with a bigoted religion, so Roman Catholics in this country saw the abolitionists as their enemy. The first bishop in the country who really took a public stand in support of the Union and the emancipation of slaves was Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati, who, along with his brother, decried slavery at the outbreak of the Civil War. Later, however, Purcell met his downfall, because Cincinnati became bankrupt and the bishops were not happy that Purcell broke ranks. Another outspoken Catholic abolitionist was Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell. Out of religious conviction, O’Connell saw slavery as a great evil. He castigated the Irish in America who were sending him money to fight for Irish emancipation from English rule while supporting slavery in the United States. Claude Maistre, a French priest originally from the Diocese of Troyes in France, who worked a while in the Chicago area and ended up in New Orleans at the time of the Civil War, also took a very strong stand against slavery. In fact, the archbishop told him to stop preaching against slavery, but he refused. Ultimately the archbishop put Maistre’s church under interdict to get him to stop.
