Some of My Best Friends Are Black (44 page)

At St. Benedict’s, two middle-aged white ladies are there for the black service. Curious, I follow them out to the parking lot, introduce myself, and politely inquire as to what brings them across the tracks. Hectic schedules, it turns out. They belong to St. Theresa’s, but they missed the four o’clock so they’re here to catch the five thirty. Blacks will drop in at the white church now and then for the same reason, and that’s all fine. But the bingo nights and the Bible study—the things that actually make a church a church—those are all separate, the women say.

“But does the church ever do anything to try to bring the two communities together?” I ask.

They look at me like I’m crazy. Then it starts to rain.

Driving home, and in the weeks and months following, I tried to put myself in a bit of an 1890s frame of mind, to understand the motivations of Archbishop Jaansens, and of that first black woman in Lafayette who’d stood up and said just give us our own. I could certainly empathize with how and why they made the decisions they made. Still, I had a hard time squaring their intentions with what I’d seen of Louisiana that day. Because what I’d seen, in town after town, had gone against all common sense, basic notions of equality, sound principles of bureaucratic organization, fiscal sanity, energy efficiency, the fundamentals of church law, the foundations
of Catholic theology, the Gospel of Matthew, and the true meaning of Christmas.

In January of 1963, the Catholic Church convened the Conference on Religion and Race at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, an interfaith gathering of nearly a thousand clergymen from every major church in the United States. This was Catholicism’s belated attempt to bring its principles and its practice into some sort of alignment.

A steady stream of religious leaders ascended to the dais and offered up lukewarm platitudes about fostering dialogue and understanding. Then an Episcopalian theologian by the name of William Stringfellow got up to the podium and launched into a real stem-winder—if you can imagine an Episcopalian stem-winder—in which he savaged Catholics and Protestants alike for lending four hundred years of moral sanction to slavery and segregation. He pointed his finger at every last preacher in the room, including himself. They were to blame—
they
had done this. He derided the efforts of the conference as being “too little, too late, and too lily white.” Stringfellow’s solution? He didn’t have one. “The most practical thing to do now,” he said, “is weep.”

In 2002, the director of Black Catholic Services for the Diocese of Lafayette conducted a survey of 155 black and white church leaders from across Acadiana. The results more than justify Stringfellow’s pessimism. While everyone gave a hearty endorsement to the idea of church unity, most every response came back loaded with caveats and conditions. The racial parishes were “still necessary.” They made people “more comfortable.” The cost of change was “too great.” This is not to say that nothing has gotten better. Population shifts have closed down some parishes and opened up new ones with less rigid ethnic identities. Hispanic and Vietnamese Catholics have moved into the diocese in increasing numbers, mixing up the whole equation. And today the diocese has six black priests (up from zero), one of whom was recently named pastor at St. John’s Cathedral downtown—a first. But these changes, while significant, are happening here and there, around the margins. In town after town, separate churches are still the norm, rooted deep in the culture and permanently fixed in brick and mortar and prefab aluminum.

The Bible is pretty clear about whether you should build your church on rock or on sand. But what are you supposed to do when you’ve built your church on a mistake? Is weeping really your only practical option? Probably. But there is also the impractical option to consider as well. The impossible is always waiting for anyone who wants to give it a try.

Father Charlie Thibodeaux doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d start a revolution. In a crowded room, you’d probably walk right by him without stopping. Slight of frame and unassuming, he has a quiet, gentle demeanor. Now in his eighties, Thibodeaux speaks softly, almost haltingly. Like my grandfather and other Cajuns from that generation, English was not Thibodeaux’s first language. He grew up speaking the local French patois, learning to talk American formally in school.

In 1964, Charlie Thibodeaux was a young Jesuit priest serving as an associate pastor at the Sacred Heart church in Grand Coteau. Both of the town’s churches, white and black, were run by Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus established by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534. The Jesuits are an elite body of clergymen, sometimes referred to as “God’s Marines.” Their order was founded with a unique mission to serve in higher education and work for social justice for the poor. Their aim is to improve people’s lot in this life, not just prepare their souls for the next one.

America’s Jesuits were fully complicit in condoning slavery. The order’s Maryland province owned slaves up until 1837, when the practice was formally renounced. Though some of those slaves were freed, many were actually sold to plantations, leaving a moral stain on what otherwise might have been a wholly noble reversal of conscience. Since then, however, judged on a relative scale, the order has been far more
forward leaning than other religious bodies in the cause of racial equality. At Loyola University in New Orleans, Jesuit clergy were instrumental in organizing integrated student groups as early as the 1940s; Loyola also hosted the first integrated college sporting events in the state of Louisiana. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King cited only a handful of positive actions taken by the white church, one of them being the integration of the Jesuits’ Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, which admitted black students peacefully and without incident prior to
Brown v. Board
. It is also no accident that St. Francis Xavier, the parish at the heart of 49/63 in Kansas City, is run by Jesuits as well.

In 1962, the Roman Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council, an effort to bring the church’s doctrine more in line with modernity. Of the many reforms that were made, one was a directive to engage the laity directly in working to implement Christ’s teachings for the poor and underprivileged—like the Jesuits, laboring for social justice as opposed to giving to charity. Just as the church was reaching out into the outside world, it also asked parishes to bring the outside world into the church. Vatican II encouraged local congregations to take the standard Roman liturgy and, where appropriate, embroider it with cultural folkways and traditions—whether African, European, or Cajun—making the churchgoing experience more accessible and meaningful to people of different nationalities. As a result, many young priests who came out of seminary in this era were steeped in the ideology of social change. While the old bishops were trying to stall Martin Luther King in Birmingham, the new kids were out marching with him in Selma. They may have been men of the cloth, but they were still the children of the sixties.

Charlie Thibodeaux wasn’t in church the day Wallace Belson was assaulted. He heard about it from the police shortly thereafter. But he went straight to his superiors and threatened to quit if measures weren’t taken. “Either they go, or I go,” he said. That same week, Thibodeaux visited the homes of the men who’d committed the assault, demanding an apology before they would be allowed back at mass. Both men were visibly nervous and ashamed—though most of their guilt stemmed from knowing they’d disrespected the church, rather than any sudden stirrings
of racial tolerance. Both men quickly admitted to being in the wrong, but tried to rationalize their actions just the same.

“They said he was drunk,” Thibodeaux says.

Belson was known in Grand Coteau as a man who enjoyed his drink; his struggles with the bottle were no secret. One of the assailants, perversely, tried to claim that he got on well with Belson, was friendly with him. On a recent winter night, the man said, he’d come across Belson lying in the road, inebriated and half frozen, and had helped carry him home to safety. But for a black man to enter the white church? In that kind of state? That was something else. Whether or not Belson had actually been drinking that morning no one can say with any certainty. “But even if he was drunk,” Thibodeaux points out, “that’s no reason to jump him.”

After the beating of Wallace Belson, Thibodeaux decided that healing the town’s racial divide was the mission to which God had called him. Two Sundays later, he took to the pulpit at Sacred Heart and gave what would be the first of many spirited sermons on the matter. “I laid a little Matthew 25 on ’em,” Thibodeaux says. “‘Whatsoever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you do to me.’ I told them if Christ came into this church, and Christ was black, you’d be rejecting him, rejecting Christ.” The image of Jesus Christ as a black man didn’t exactly go over with the all-white congregation. “By the time I was done,” Thibodeaux says, “you could have heard a pin drop.”

Charlie Thibodeaux grew up as “the least of these” himself. Poor, one of nine children on a small family farm in nearby Carencro, he was out in the fields at the age of four, picking cotton side by side with the day-laboring blacks who came to work the farm. They were always welcome in his family’s home, he recalls. Those who knew him say he was more at ease among blacks than he ever was around the more sophisticated, well-heeled whites at Sacred Heart. When I first spoke to Thibodeaux, it was via a spotty phone connection from the San Ignacio mission in Asunción, Paraguay, where he has lived and worked among the poor for the last thirty years.

From the spring of 1964 onward, the young priest kept up his crusade. He preached and preached, week after week. He even waded into
local politics, openly campaigning against the formation of a local White Citizens’ Council. For a long time, the only measurable effect of Charlie Thibodeaux’s actions was a net increase in the hatred of Charlie Thibodeaux. Whenever he said mass, pictures of monkeys and racist cartoons were passed up in the collection plate. The cars outside church were leafleted with flyers from white supremacy groups. Eventually, the parish had to call the town marshal to stand guard in the parking lot during services. Reports began to circulate that the young priest would be beaten himself, or killed. Phone calls came to the rectory late at night with empty, ominous silence on the other end. Finally, a group of white parishioners tried to hit the church where it had always been vulnerable in the past: withholding their weekly tithe from the collection plate. Thibodeaux dismissed the threat out of hand. “This isn’t a club,” he told them. For six years, the priest did not let up, but nothing really changed, either. One or two black parishioners would attend mass at Sacred Heart here and there, and there was no more violence. But the root problem remained: Grand Coteau had two churches where there should have been only one.