Black Catholic recounts story of 'struggle, enlightenment'

Published: 2004-02-11

LIMA, Ohio (CNS) -- Nell Lester sees the story of being African-American and Catholic as one of "struggle and enlightenment." "For every struggle, there is something uplifting," she said about her own journey in the Catholic Church. "You find the rainbow." But years ago, after she first became a Catholic, the rainbow didn't seem to have been particularly present. Raised a Baptist, she and her husband, Tony, a Catholic, got married 23 years ago in Kentucky. When they moved to Lima, she just didn't find in the Catholic Church the "cultural effect that was in my Baptist church at home." "We were parish-hoppers," she recalled. "But I would go to Mass and sing in my Africentric way, and the priest would encourage me 'not to ever lose that.'" "Still, I got tired (of the racism)," she told the Catholic Chronicle, Toledo's diocesan newspaper. But several years ago a notice in the parish bulletin for a Toledo diocesan awards event named for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. started her and her husband's involvement in events that promote cultural awareness among African-American Catholics.

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