(Courtesy photo)
By Ralph E. Moore Jr.
Special to the AFRO
There are 16 predominantly Black Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, but by Christmas Day 2024, there will only be seven.
Nine congregations will be removed from their then shuttered church homes and folded into other churches. Under a plan announced earlier this year in May, the number of parishes in Baltimore, sadly, will be reduced from 61 to 23. And unfortunately, the plan entitled obscurely, “Seek the City to Come,” will affect Black Catholic parishes at a greater rate than White or Hispanic parishes. Proportionately speaking, more Black Catholics will be evicted from their church home than any other racial group in the city.
Churches are being merged into other churches because the archdiocese thinks the number of Sunday attendees is too low and the costs of maintaining church buildings are becoming increasingly unaffordable. There is no talk of faith in their calculations– only finance. No talk of the historic racism practiced in Catholic churches for centuries included segregated seating, ushers ignoring Blacks in predominantly White churches and seminaries and convents refusing to admit Blacks.
African Americans remained faithful to God in the past while waiting for Whites to receive communion first before anyone Black could partake of the Blessed Sacrament– a form of White supremacy even at the highest of Christian religious ceremonies.
Again, Black Catholic churches and schools have routinely been shut down within the Catholic Church in the United States. We have remained faithful through enslavement, segregation, mass incarceration and mass poverty.
And so, church authorities counting on our strong faith in God announced the closing of nine of the 16 Black Catholic churches, surprising members, disappointing and angering most Black Catholics in the oldest Catholic archdiocese in the nation.
The church hierarchy, represented by Urban Vicar Bruse Lewandowski and Archbishop William J. Lori, are treating Black Catholics and others as if pieces on their hierarchical chess board, moving parishioners around while disrupting routine Sunday travel and congregations’ familiar membership and in-house practices.
We are overwhelmingly elderly congregants in the Black churches and most expected to be funeralized from their church home. So, that expectation will itself die.
The Black Catholic churches that will remain in place are St. Bernadine; St. Ambrose; New All Saints; St. Veronica and St. Francis Xavier. Merged into St. Bernadine will be: St. Edward, St. Gregory, St. Peter Claver and St. Pius V.
New All Saints Church will absorb St. Cecilia and Immaculate Conception (the church in Baltimore City, not the church of the same name in Towson). Also, Blessed Sacrament Church will be merged into St. Matthew Church along with several others. Finally, St. Francis Xavier Church will absorb the congregations and incomes of St. Ann and St. Wenceslaus churches, while their buildings will be closed.
The nine Black Catholic churches will be shut down in the middle of the Thanksgiving to Christmas holiday season. The official date is Dec. 1, 2024. It will make the statement from the archdiocese to Black and other churches: “Merry Christmas, you’re closed!”
Sounds very heartless, because it is!.
When Baltimore had a majority White population, most Catholic churches in the city were White. But as white folks moved out of the city to the suburbs following the 1954 Brown decision, which ruled against racial segregation in schools and elsewhere by extension, inner-city church congregations became mostly Black. Even more Whites moved out of the city following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Black Catholics (the remnant) remained in Catholic Churches sustaining them for decades.
Certainly, Black folks moved to the suburbs, too. But most to this day have returned to their home church traveling distances of three, four, five and six miles to get back to the church in the neighborhood where they grew up and where some attended the church’s local Catholic school.
The Archdiocesan bishops with their “Seek the City to Come” decrees have done nothing but wreak havoc within the diocese. Some pastors have already been removed. Vacant church buildings will be added to neighborhoods already struggling with vacant houses. And congregations of strangers in the past forced together by the bishops have often not been able to get along.
The day St. Ann Church closes is the day I leave Catholicism for good. Dec. 1, 2024 I will say goodbye to 72 years of being Catholic since I was three months old. Others will leave too, I am told.
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