By Thea Jarvis

When Father Anthony Delisi was an undergraduate at Catholic University, he joined the first picket line in the nation to protest public segregation.

That was in 1946, when the National Theater in Washington, displayed signs indicating seats “for whites” and “for colored.” From that time on, the now well-known Father Anthony, a Cistercian monk at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, has found his life unmistakably intertwined with the heart and history of black people.

“My vocation really originated with black people,” said Father Anthony, a sturdy, Pennsylvania-born Sicilian who has been 25 years a priest. “After Fides House, a settlement center for blacks in downtown Washington, I taught religion to children at Holy Redeemer Church on Massachusetts Avenue.”

“One day I asked the kids ‘Do you want me to become a priest?’” said Father Anthony, recalling a special memory. “They answered ‘Yes, yes!’ Six months later I was in a Trappist monastery in Georgia.”

It was his commitment to black people that drew Father Anthony to the South. This area was, in his words, “the heart of the integration struggle.”

Ultimately, this loyalty to the race that encouraged his vocation would lead Father Anthony Delisi to the fatherland of black American – Africa.

In 1979, when fellow Trappist Father Tom Fidelis Smith returned prematurely from Africa suffering from malnutrition, Father Anthony volunteered to take his place at a Nigerian monastery.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Africa,” Father Anthony said candidly. “I jumped at the chance!”

By later summer of 1979, arrangements were completed and Father Anthony found himself bound for southeastern Nigeria where a native Ibo monastery had sprung up and was moving toward full affiliation with the Cistercian rule.

“The Mount Calvary Monastery is unique in that it was founded by Africans, not white missionaries,” said Father Anthony. “Our job was to help them on their road to autonomy and incorporation into the Cistercian family.”

After the devastating Biafran War, which plagued most of Iboland in the late sixties, Nigerian Father Abraham Ojifu had founded a monastic community based on the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Cistercian Regulations. His bishop and the people of Awhum had donated land for the foundation, and the small grass-roots order was called the Friends of Jesus.

When Father Abraham applied for incorporation into the Cistercian Order in 1974, it was agreed that steps could be taken to prepare the Nigerians to enter the order as an affiliate of the Genessee Abbey in New York, which took place on July 2, 1978.

Father Anthony Delisi was one of those “steps.”

“There were only three priests for a community of 40 men,” said Father Anthony, who supervised the 22 professed monks and taught scripture, liturgy, moral theology and monastic history.

One of Father Anthony’s main tasks was to help the Nigerian monks put their finances on a sound footing. This he did by expanding the monastery’s poultry production and introducing Sicilian trench irrigation. He also added the use of a rototiller, imported from the United States.

“I had to go to Africa to avoid the hottest summer in Georgia history,” he said with a smile. “In Awhum, except for the rainy season, the weather is ideal – not above 95 or below 60 degrees.”

The daily schedule at the monastery, though rigorous, was not too different from that followed by the monks in Conyers.

“At Mount Calvary we rose at 2:45 a.m. and went to bed at 8 p.m. Here we rise at 3:45 and go to bed at 8:30,” said Father Anthony. “But I didn’t mind it. It’s all relative to where you are. They have sunrise at 6 a.m. and sunset at 6 p.m. year-round.”

The Nigerian diet, though different, offered no insurmountable obstacle to the intrepid Father Anthony. “I never saw apples or cheese, but the monks ate many dishes made with cassava, a root-like vegetable that is the main staple,” he said. “Gurri, a native dish made with cassava, had an awful taste until I learned that you don’t chew it – you swallow it whole!”

The most difficult adjustment for Father Anthony was neither food, nor climate, nor language (English is the official tongue), nor the malaria he contracted while in Nigeria.

“The hardest part of my life in Africa was adjusting to the mentality of the Ibo people. They are very traditional, and not readily open to change,” he said.

Father Anthony, who holds a master’s degree in liturgy from Notre Dame University, noted that the Ibo see the changes flowing from the Second Vatican Council as primarily “due to the influence of the Western world.” They are entirely comfortable with the old devotions and the Roman rite introduced in the early 1900’s by Irish missionaries who brought Catholicism to the Ibo territory.

“They generally don’t want to include ceremonial dance or traditional African music in their liturgies, although some churches are beginning to introduce native instruments and the vernacular is coming slowly,” said Father Anthony.

The Nigerian population, which is 50 to 60 percent Catholic, is a “booming source of vocations,” according to Father Anthony, but the neighboring African country of Cameroon is liturgically far ahead of Nigeria.

“In the early 1900’s, Catholics in the Cameroons were receiving communion in the hand,” he said, noting the absence of this custom as well as the lack of a permanent diaconate and the rare use of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist in Nigeria.

For Father Anthony, however, the most outstanding attribute of the Ibo people is their simple and enduring faith.

“They are people of a living faith and posses a sense of something beyond. Even those who continue to practice the centuries-old pagan traditions were friendly and honest and very open to me as a white man.”

Perhaps this was because, in the love that Father Anthony brought with him to Africa, they sensed a heart that knew no color.