Black Catholicism
Black Catholicism or African-American Catholicism comprises the African-American people, beliefs, and practices in the Catholic Church.
There are around three million Black Catholics in the United States, making up 6% of the total population of African Americans, who are mostly Protestant, and 4% of American Catholics. Black Catholics in America are a heavily immigrant population, with 68% being born in the United States, 12% born in Africa, 11% born in the Caribbean and 5% born in other parts of Central or South America. About a quarter of Black Catholics worship in historically black parishes, most of which were established during the Jim Crow era as a means of racial segregation. Others were established in black communities and merely reflected the surrounding population, while the most recent crop came about due to population displacement during and after the Great Migration.
Prior to the Second Vatican Council, Black Catholics attended Mass in Latin, as did the rest of the Western Church, and did not display much difference in terms of liturgy or spiritual patrimony. During the 1950s innovators such as Clarence Rivers began to integrate Negro spirituals into settings of the Mass; this trend eventually blossomed into the Black Catholic Movement during the larger Black Power zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s. Some have termed this period the "Black Catholic Revolution" or the "Black Catholic Revolt". As this newfound Black Consciousness swept up many black clergy, consecrated religious, and laypeople, Black Catholicism came of age. Entire disciplines of Black Catholic studies emerged, Gospel Mass became a staple of Black Catholic parishes, Black Christian spirituality was also claimed by Black Catholics, and the Black Catholic Church emerged as a significant player in the public and ecclesial life of the larger American Church.
A large exodus of African-American Catholics during the 1970s was followed by a continually shrinking population of African Americans within the Catholic Church in the 21st century. A 2021 Pew Research study noted that only just over half of Black American adults who were raised Catholic still remain in the Church. In 2025, Cardinal Robert Prevost—a descendant of Black Creole Catholics in New Orleans—was elected Pope Leo XIV.
Terminology
Definition
While the term "black" is often used in reference to any African-descended person, the term in apposition to "Catholicism" is usually used to refer to African-Americans. This became solidified during the black pride movement of the late 60s and 70s, when blackness as an expressive cultural element became more and more popular in the public discourse. As "black" became the most common descriptor for African-Americans, so "Black Catholic" became the most common moniker for their Catholic adherents.Developments in the expression of Catholicism among Black Catholics eventually led to a more independent identity within the Church, such that terms like "Black Catholicism" and "the Black Catholic Church" became more and more commonplace.
History
Background (pre-slavery)
Biblical and Patristic era (1st–5th century)
Catholic Christianity among African-descended people has its roots in the earliest converts to Christianity, including Mark the Evangelist, the unnamed Ethiopian eunuch, Simon of Cyrene, and Simeon Niger. Several of the early Church Fathers were also native to Africa, including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Cyprian, and Augustine. Saints Perpetua and Felicity and Saint Maurice, early martyrs, were also African. There have also been three African popes: Victor I, Melchaides, and Gelasius I. The vast majority of these Patristic-era figures resided in North Africa, where various Christian communities thrived until the Muslim conquests of the region. The Muslim takeover of Southern Spain forced a significant Catholic community from there into North Africa, specifically Morocco; these individuals constituted the Mozarabic tradition.There were multiple early Christian kingdoms in Africa, the most notable of which emerged in Ethiopia. Around this same era, however, there were also three Nubian Christian kingdoms, all of which were conquered and left little trace of their former glory; scholars have since recovered some of their history. Due to the Chalcedonian Schism in the 5th century, however, most of this Eastern Christianity became divorced from Catholicism very early on.
Immediately prior to the dawn of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Catholic Christianity in West Africa—the region that would produce virtually all of the individuals ending up in America as slaves—was primarily limited to converts borne from early European missionary contact, especially in the Kongo region. Roughly a century before Europe made contact with what would become the United States, the Portuguese entered the Kongo and began to make converts and engage in trade; there was also some limited slave-trading between the European power and their new African colleagues.
Slavery era (1400s–1867)
The Kingdom of Kongo (14th–17th century)
The Portuguese appetite for African slaves quickly grew beyond the intentions or capacity of the Kongolese people, leading to one Kongo ruler going so far as to write the Portuguese king for assistance in stemming the tide of citizens being taken captive from his land. Many of these victims would eventually be brought to the Americas, and some scholars have suggested their common cultural heritage and shared faith led them to instigate at least one major rebellion in the colonial United States.Europe in North America (1528–1803)
Spain
The first African Catholic slaves that arrived in what would eventually become the United States primarily came during the period of Spanish colonization. Esteban, an African Catholic enslaved by Spaniards, was among the first European groups to enter the region in 1528, via what would become Florida. He would go on to serve on various other North American expeditions. The Afro-Spanish conquistador Juan Garrido entered Puerto Rico in 1509, helping to conquer it for the white Spanish settlers.African Catholics, slave and free, were also among the Spanish settlers who established the Mission Nombre de Dios in the mid-16th century in what is now St. Augustine, Florida. Soon after, the newly established Spanish Florida territory was attracting numerous fugitive slaves from the Thirteen Colonies. The Spanish freed slaves who reached their territory if they converted to Catholicism. Most such freedmen settled at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first settlement of freed slaves in North America.
Spain also settled the California region with a number of African and mulatto Catholics, including at least ten of the recently re-discovered Los Pobladores, the 44 founders of Los Angeles in 1781.
France
As more European nations became involved in the transatlantic slave trade, multiple colonial powers would join the Spanish in bringing African slaves to their colonies in North America. The French involvement would result in various new African Catholic communities, including the most famous, in Louisiana. Here, slaves, affranchi and free people of color formed a unique hierarchy within the larger American caste system, in which free people of color enjoyed the most privilege and slaves the least—though more phenotypically black individuals faced various prejudices whether they were slave or free. Even so, French Catholicism became notable for its degree of interracialism, in which much of Church life showed little to no racial discrimination.Britain
The same could not be said of the thirteen American colonies of British America, where Catholicism was less common and social strictures were more pronounced and harsh. There was little to no distinction made between free-born blacks and freedmen, and while Catholic slave owners in Colonial America were under the same mandate as any Catholics in that they were obligated to convert, baptize, and meet the spiritual needs of their slaves, they were not under any local government codes to the same effect and often neglected their duties in this regard. After the Revolutionary War and the exit of France and Spain from most of North America, Black Catholics in America faced an increasingly unique situation as African-Americans living in slavery and after emancipation, segregation in the United States.Antebellum and Civil War Era (1776–1867)
Pierre Toussaint
During this period a number of Black Catholics would make a name for themselves, including Venerable Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-American born into slavery and brought to New York shortly after the founding of the United States. Freed by his owner in 1807, he would go on to become a famous hairdresser, as well as a notable philanthropist alongside his wife Juliette. He is the first layperson to be buried in the crypt below the main altar of Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, normally reserved for bishops of the Archdiocese of New York.First religious orders and parishes
The Oblate Sisters of Providence were founded by Haitian-American nun Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange and Fr James Nicholas Joubert in 1828 in Baltimore, in a time when black women were not allowed to join existing orders and were thought to be unworthy of the spiritual task. Mother Lange has since been declared a Servant of God and could soon be declared a saint. Dedicated to providing education to otherwise neglected black youths, the order would found the all-girls St Frances Academy in the same year as their founding, the first and oldest continually-operating Black Catholic school in the US.The Oblates' 11th member, Anne Marie Becraft, was quite probably the illicit granddaughter of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. She started Georgetown Seminary, a school for black girls, in 1820 at age 15.
The Sisters of the Holy Family, founded in New Orleans in 1837 by Mother Henriette Delille, was similar in origin and purpose to the Oblates, though founded by and made up of Creole free women of color. They too dedicated themselves to education and have operated St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans since its founding in 1867. They also founded the first and oldest Catholic nursing home in the United States, Lafon Nursing Facility, in 1841.
That same year and in the same city, St Augustine's Catholic Church, the nation's oldest Black Catholic church, was founded by free blacks in the nation's oldest black neighborhood.
In 1843, Haitian-American Catholics in Baltimore established the Society of the Holy Family, a 200-member devotional group dedicated to Bible study, prayer, and especially singing. It was the first Black Catholic lay group in the US. The group would disband after two years when the archdiocese refused to let them use their large meeting hall.
In 1845, one of the founding members of the Oblate sisters, Theresa Maxis Duchemin, helped found a predominantly-white order of sisters in Michigan, the IHM congregation. She had been the first US-born Black Catholic religious sister when she helped found the Oblates. Notably, due to racism her name and history was scrubbed from the IHM sisters' records for 160 years, until the early 1990s.