Politics & communion: a bishop's response to segregationists

For the first time in over forty years, there is a strong possibility that the next president of the United States will be Catholic. Unlike the pride and jubilance that American Catholics showered on John F. Kennedy, though, the potential election of John F. Kerry promises to be as divisive for Catholics as for the electorate at large. Several American bishops have suggested that Kerry's positions on abortion and stem-cell research call into question his ability to present himself publicly as a Catholic, and some have even suggested that Catholics intending to vote for him may be due for an examination of conscience. Conservative American Catholics, in particular, have begun to sound like sectarian Protestants, with the "saved" seeking to publicly out the "damned" in order to preserve the integrity and purity of the true faith.

This was not how Catholicism was understood in the Louisiana of the 1950s and 1960s, when the specter of excommunication loomed over a group of Louisiana Catholics because of their vociferous public opposition to the racial integration of Catholic schools. Just as heat and humidity define Louisiana's climate, Catholicism defines the culture. Especially in South Louisiana, personal and family identity is deeply intertwined with the Catholic Church for a significant portion of the population. One was Catholic regardless of what one did or how one behaved. Catholicism placed individuals in an interlocking web of relationships, values, and identities, all intimately tied to the church.

As in the rest of the American South, segregation was entrenched in Louisiana at the turn of the twentieth century, but Catholic Louisiana was known for bending the rules and blurring the lines, particularly in New Orleans. Unlike many Protestant denominations in the South, Catholicism provided no religious justification for segregation, seeing it instead as another unfortunate product of man's fallen nature. Catholic dioceses in Louisiana did not create separate churches for blacks and whites until well into the twentieth century, and even after that, black Catholics could attend Mass at many "white" churches, as long as they sat in the back and took Communion after the whites had finished. In some rural parts of the state, segregated churches were unknown until the 1950s, and many of those that did appear were established primarily to allow blacks to worship in an environment where they were not forced to defer to whites.

Schools, on the other hand, were more strictly segregated. As all Southerners knew, the familiarity of the school setting made it ground zero for inappropriate interracial intimacy, and ultimately, the great evil of miscegenation. After World War II, the push for integrated Catholic schooling became a major national issue. The Catholic schools of St. Louis and Washington, D.C., were integrated in the late 1940s while Jim Crow laws were still in force in both areas. In 1949, the archbishop of New Orleans, German-born Joseph Rummel, began laying the seeds for school desegregation by denouncing racial segregation as un-Christian and, in the following year, removing all WHITE and COLORED signs from Catholic churches.

In 1956, Archbishop Rummel published his second major pastoral letter denouncing segregation (the first had been in 1953), and announced a plan for the desegregation of Catholic schools. Segregationists responded immediately with threats in the state legislature to deny aid to Catholic schools (Huey Long had made Catholic schools eligible for state aid in the 1930s), protests to Pope Pius XII, and the burning of crosses on the archbishop's lawn. Recognizing the depth of opposition and the difficulties of integrating Catholic schools before public schools, Rummel slowed his integration plan. When the New Orleans public schools were integrated in 1960, Catholic school enrollment jumped dramatically as whites attempted to flee integration. Finally, in 1962, Rummel announced that Catholic schools would be desegregated in the 1962-1963 academic year. In the end, Catholic schools integrated rather peacefully, but not before Rummel was forced to take a dramatic stand in defense of his authority.

Three Louisiana Catholics were well known for their diehard stances against integration. Leander Perez was once a state judge but is best known as the political boss of Plaquemines Parish, an extremely isolated rural area south of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Under Perez's leadership, many of the black people of Plaquemines lived in a debased state of peonage little better than slavery. In 1960, Perez retired and devoted himself full time to the battle against integration. Perez was joined in the public fight by Una Gaillot, the leader of a militantly segregationist group called Save Our Nation, and Jackson Ricau, who was executive director of the New Orleans Citizens' Council. All three publicly repudiated the theological arguments behind Rummel's statements on racial equality and led efforts to encourage other lay Catholics to defy Rummel and to undermine the church.