By Gretchen Keiser

The Josephite priest and bishop who this week becomes Atlanta’s archbishop and the first black archbishop in the U.S. Catholic Church found his inspiration in a devoted parish priest.

Father Joseph Maurer, also a Josephite, died in early April at a nursing home run by the order, a few weeks after the boy he inspired to the priesthood in the 1940s was chosen for this historic appointment.

“We always need to remember our past, that we stand in continuity with our past,” Bishop Marino said in an April 10 homily in Washington, D.C.

His reflection that day upon his own past, as a black Catholic who grew up in a segregated society in Mississippi and a segregated Church that has changed greatly in his lifetime, was spoken without bitterness.

Biloxi, Mississippi, a seacoast community on the gulf Coast is more akin to the Catholic and coastal flavor of New Orleans and Louisiana than to the largely Protestant interior Southern cities, he said. Our Mother of Sorrows in Biloxi was one in a rough line of Josephite-staffed parishes serving the black community that stretches from Baltimore, Maryland through Virginia on to Florida and west across the South to Texas, then Los Angeles.

Strong Catholic roots in the Marino family go back generations, as his maternal grandfather helped build Our Mother of Sorrows, and the vocation to the priesthood of Eugene was complemented by the entrance of his sister Eileen into the Oblate Sisters of Providence, and now the profession of a niece, Sister Sharon Howell, as a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Midwest.

“One of my earliest recollections is the family rosary with my mother and sisters and brother,” Bishop Marino said in an interview April 10. While still a toddler, too young to pray, he remembers walking around behind his sisters as they knelt around the bed, trying to step into the backs of their shoes. When his mother’s old prayer book deteriorated, she could still say the Litany of Loretto from memory, he said.

“...the clearest and most compelling lesson from our past is that our black Catholic laymen and women, whose mothers and fathers, Lord, how they hung in there! Sitting in the back pews of the churches and waiting until the end of the communion lines and confessions lines…Lord, how they clung to the faith! Generations of black Catholics never lived to see a black priest or religious, let alone ever to dream that their son or daughter might become one.”

From Bishop Marino’s homily at the opening liturgy of the National Black Catholic Congress, May 21, 1987.

“The role of the Church in the black community in general has been so central,” he observed, noting that this was true particularly in black Protestantism, but had its parallel in black Catholic history. The church served not only the spiritual needs of the people, but also social and educational needs.

In pragmatic terms, the black church that had a white minister or priest had “access to the power” within the segregated civic community, he pointed out.

Father Maurer – “the priest who was so influential in my own development, who probably more than any one single person was responsible for my becoming a priest” – went to city officials and police on behalf of young blacks who were at the mercy of a system that presumed their guilt and fined them and their families for minor infractions and for “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Father Maurer used to go and get them out and make them give them back their fine. It was a courageous thing even for a white person to do” at that time, the bishop said. It was also a vivid witness of the Church ‘fulfilling its role in the community.”

The pastor was also in the school once a month to hand out the students’ report cards and check every grade as he did so. “It was a very ceremonious thing, a very frightening thing,” the bishop said, describing a memory that might resonate with other Catholics of several generations. “That was the day of reckoning. There was no way to fake it.”

“By the same token, you might see him the next day in his coveralls, stringing lights for the next bazaar or pouring cement for a new septic tank.”

Father Maurer was also a band director who taught his young people the fundamentals of music and started a school band that figured in the pride of the school in its fierce school and sports rivalry, the bishop said, with the black public elementary and high school.

The bishop’s vocation was expressed in terms of this devoted priest’s diverse ministry. “I would like to be a priest like Father Maurer was,” he said, an inspiration that would start him on a path moving dramatically away from Biloxi.

The nearest seminary was a Divine Word seminary just outside Biloxi, while the nearest Josephite seminary was in New York State, 1500 miles away. “When you’re born and raised in Biloxi, you don’t think of 1500 miles,” the bishop said. “One hundred miles was more than I ever traveled until I was 18.”

The influence of Father Maurer was sufficient to overcome even that barrier, however. In seventh or eighth grade, Gene Marino mentioned the seminary to his pastor and, after a conference with his parents, Father Maurer recommended that he enter the Josephite seminary, not then, but after high school at Our Mother of Sorrows. Despite the distance involved, the bishop recalled that he was enthusiastic. “If Joe Maurer said there was a chance, that’s where I wanted to go.”

Before he left Biloxi, the bishop who now serves on the board of trustees for Xavier University in New Orleans and for Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., completed high school in the tiny Biloxi building where two grades shared a classroom. “I had heard everything in ninth grade the teacher was trying to teach in tenth grade. I did my homework while the teacher was teaching the other grade. I just didn’t find it that challenging that I really had to work hard at it.”

The regimented seminary life that he entered at Epiphany College in Newburgh, New York – “the bell going off 36 times a day” – was heightened in its impact by the move into integrated society. The seminary was “the first time I had ever done anything with white people,” the bishop recalled, finding himself with young men from New York, Boston and Chicago. “Everybody else talked funny.”

The strict life was “a shocking change, but I adjusted to it,” he said, comparing the demands to those being put now upon a nephew in marine boot camp. “Some white-knuckle it through the first year. It made a survivor out of you. You don’t have to like something to adjust to it.” Family photos show a snowfall on the steps of epiphany College and the seminarians, in cassocks, studying and working. His two seminary classmates, Father William McKenna and Father John Harfmann, will concelebrate the Mass of Installation May 5, a gesture that reflects the depth of ties now extending over 25 years of life as Josephite priests.

“Let us not for a moment forget our courageous black Catholic women who, long before we discovered our manhood in the Church, were acting fearlessly with characteristic black wit and wisdom. We have with us this evening the example of faith and fidelity of Elizabeth Lange, Henrietta DeLisle, and Elizabeth Barbara Williams. Against incredible odds, in a segregated church, they formed new communities of religious women to serve our spiritual, educational and human needs, writing a glorious page of American Catholic Church history.”

From Bishop Marino’s homily at the opening liturgy of the National Black Catholic Congress, May 21, 1987.

Those who know Bishop Marino in his working quarters at the Josephite Seminary in Washington, D.C. note his ability to delegate administrative work to his assistant, Joe Fitzpatrick, a retired naval officer in his late 50s who commanded two nuclear missile submarines during his military career. “He tries to respond to a lot of things,” Fitzpatrick said, mentioning the invitations to speak that come to the bishop from black Catholic groups around the country; his work as secretary to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; his support of Archbishop James Hickey in the archbishop’s work as chancellor of Catholic University. By delegating administrative work to Fitzpatrick, “I give him the time” to do pastoral work and essential duties.

His office in the seminary was being packed slowly for the move to Atlanta during an early April visit, but his fellow Josephite, Father Charles McMahon, mentioned that four photographs normally hang in his office. One pictures him with Pope John Paul II during the pope’s first U.S. trip; the next with Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus touched off the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

A third shows him with his two Josephite classmates and the fourth is a shot of him jogging. The combination expresses essential elements of Atlanta’s new archbishop, Father McMahon reflected.

His memory of his parents – his father, Jesus Maria, a baker, and his mother, Lottie Irene Bradford, who worked part-time as a domestic and as a maid in a theatre in Biloxi – is that the family had their needs met when he was growing up, although everyone they knew was relatively poor. “We always had what we needed,” he said, “I did not seem to suffer from poverty. There were always people who had so much less than we did.”

His father brought home day-old bread and cakes from the bakery, a luxury for the neighborhood, and “there were those to whom we gave food.” While he grew up wearing clothes given to his mother by other families, their family also gave away clothes to others. “When I went to seminary, I had a suit that I graduated from high school in, two pairs of trousers, a pair of brown and white shoes that I dyed black, six pairs of socks.” It seemed more than adequate for any need he might have, the bishop recalled.

After he was at seminary, his father bought a coat for him at an Army surplus store, had the coat dyed black and sewed black buttons on it. “I had it all my years in seminary,” the bishop said. Looking back on the story now, he’s sure that the family must have been poor for his father to have gone to those lengths to get him a coat.

But the young man who left Biloxi for the seminary in 1952 received from his family and his Catholic roots all that he would need.