By Gretchen Keiser

Father Cyprian Davis, a Benedictine monk with a passionate interest in the history of black Catholics, describes himself as a detective. He has searched for the authentic story of the black presence in the Catholic Church, particularly in the Americas, and he has found that the story is rich and intriguing, extending back to the early-settlement of this country.

“As black Catholics most of us suffer from a little bit of an inferiority complex,” Father Davis said during a workshop March 5 at St. Anthony’s Church in Atlanta. That complex includes beliefs “…that we are latecomers to the church …that we are minority members in a white church …cut off from authentic black religious experience which, in this country, is largely Protestant,” Father Davis said.

Such beliefs are at odds with history which, as it is researched, reveals a strong black presence in the U.S. church and individual lives of great sacrifice and holiness, he said. A native of Washington, D.C. which is one of the country’s centers of black Catholicism historically, Father Davis was trained as a church historian and became a monk at St. Meinrad’s Archabbey in Indiana in 1950. Ordained a priest in 1956 he taught church history for 20 years and then, in the mid-1970s, began to study seriously the history of black Catholics in the United States.

The training and education, which includes a doctorate from the University of Louvain, Belgium, in historical science, have increasingly been used to search out the lives and contributions of black Catholics. Among those whom Father Davis talked about were:

-- Pierre Toussaint, a slave to a French family who came to New York City in the 1800s. Upon the death of his master, Toussaint, who was trained as a hairdresser, supported not only himself, but the widow of his master who was unable to provide for herself. He became known as “a man of tremendous piety and charity” in New York, working with the poor, both black and white, Father Davis said. He died in 1853 and the Archdiocese of New York has not introduced his cause for canonization.

-- Elizabeth Lange, a black woman who was among French-speaking Haitians to come to the United States following political upheavals in Haiti during the 1800s. With four other black women, Elizabeth Lange began to care for and teach black children in Baltimore, Md., organizing a school and an orphanage and providing this care amid great struggles. From their initial work, the woman were encouraged to begin living as a religious community and began the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first religious order of black women in this country. When Elizabeth Lange died in 1889, the order had spread to other parts of this country.

Augustus Tolton, “the father of all black Catholic priests in this country,” the son of two slaves who was trained as a seminarian in Rome after he was denied acceptance in U.S. seminaries. When his father died during the Civil War, Tolton’s mother moved to Illinois and raised her children as Catholics despite opposition. Toltons’ education was interrupted and he was repeatedly thwarted in his desire to become a priest, but helped by some individual priests he was accepted by Rome for training. He was sent back to the United States as a missionary and ordained in 1886. Before his death at the age of 43, he became the first black priest in Chicago where he started a black parish.

-- Daniel Rudd, a newspaperman who hungered to interest blacks in the Catholic Church and believed in the church as a route to justice. He founded a Catholic weekly newspaper to evangelize the black community and helped to found the Catholic Press Association and the Negro Press Association. Even more ambitiously and prophetically, he helped to organize the first lay Catholic Congress in the United States, which was held Jan. 1-4, 1889 in Washington, and which was a black Catholic Lay Congress. The black Congress was held annually for five years, becoming progressively more radical in outlook, and closing each Congress with an address to fellow Catholics. The fourth address sought an end to segregation in Catholic churches and expressed the viewpoint of the Congress in terms that drew inspiration from the early church and that foreshadowed ideas that emerged only in recent years since the Second Vatican Council.

Father Davis, who is the author of a general church history, “The Church – A Living Heritage,” is now at work on an article investigation the little known black Catholic Lay Congresses of the 1890s.

In his talk at St. Anthony’s, which also discussed the history of Christianity in Africa, Father Davis emphasized that blacks have roots in Christianity and Catholicism that go back to the early church. In the United States’ history he cited the 1785 letter of John Carroll, who would become the first U.S. bishop. Describing the state of the Catholic Church in the New World, Carroll said of 15,800 Catholics, 3,000 were slaves. “Two hundred years ago, one-fifth of the Catholic populations (in the United States) was black,” Father Davis commented.

Later he emphasized that “black Catholicism has been there from the beginning,” comparing its history to the words of poet Claud McKay – “like a strong tree against a thousand storms”.