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Charts the Black Catholic attempt to gain independence within the larger Catholic Church
In 1971, a delegation of Black Catholics traveled to the Vatican seeking a meeting with Pope Paul VI. While they did not meet the pope, they informed Vatican officials of the plight of Black Catholics in the United States. They wished to form their own church governance, independent from the White bishops who oversaw their diocese, so that they could exercise governance over their parishes and schools, which were frequently under threat of closure. Their journey was a chapter in a long history of struggle around African American missions and the place of African Americans in the Catholic Church.
The Black Catholic Movement charts the long arc of the movement among Black Catholics to seek independence within the Catholic Church. Influenced by the Black Power Movement’s struggle for self-determination as well as the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Black Catholic Movement hoped to establish new ecclesiastical structures that would give them ownership over their church. When American Catholicism proved inflexible to their demands, the break-away Afrocentric Church, Imani Temple, drew thousands of Black Catholics away from Roman Catholicism.
Drawing on interviews and archival research in New Orleans, Detroit, and Washington, DC, the book reconstructs the Black Catholic struggle to maintain distinct Black Catholic communities and to preserve their spiritual, liturgical, and theological heritage. The volume comes up to the present, noting that although allowances have been made for Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church while maintaining their specific Anglican liturgies and traditions, the church has not granted this independence to Black Catholics. The debate about how to navigate unity within the Catholic Church while preserving Black Catholic heritage is still on-going. Ultimately, the book makes the case for the urgency of Black Catholic self-determination and self-governance.
— John C. Seitz, author of No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns
"For nearly two hundred years Black Catholics-enslaved and free– have been wrestling to sustain Church’s presence in predominantly Black communities. In this work, Joseph Flipper does more than situate the contemporary Black Catholic Movement in relation to the 19th-century efforts of Black Catholics to nurture and practice their faith in the face of protracted racism in church and society. This work also exposes the Church’s willingness to create “special ecclesiastical circumscriptions” that allow Catholics insufficiently served by typical diocesan ecclesiastical structures to preserve and practice their distinctive cultural and religious rituals and traditions, while overlooking or dismissing similar requests from Black Catholics. The struggle for participation and communion continues."
— M. Shawn Copeland, Professor Emerita, Boston College
"A brilliant argument for African American religious self-determination. Not since Cyprian Davis has a scholar made such a significant contribution to the field of Black Catholic Studies. This book informs, challenges, and inspires in all the best ways. A must-read for historians, theologians, and church leaders alike."
— Andrew Prevot, Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies at Georgetown University and author of Black Life and Christian Spirituality
"This important work surveys the struggle of the Black Catholic Movement for its “portion” of the Church. Recognizing segregation as forced, but also as a strategy of resistance, Flipper examines the struggle of Black Catholic agency, for preservation of its cultural traditions, and for belonging in the face of the larger Church’s opposition."
— Carolyn M. Jones Medine, co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora
"The most comprehensive, rigorous, and detailed account to date of the long struggle of black Catholic inclusion in the church. Flipper has given us not just an account of that struggle but of the work of the Holy Spirit found in the voices and efforts of black Catholics to be embraced by a church that they full embrace and indeed hold up. This is a generational book that will instruct the church for many decades."
— Willie James Jennings, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies, Yale University Divinity School