When I was in high school in the early '80s, my American history teacher, Stephen Ochs (pronounced "Oaks") -- a small, youthful-looking preppie who was mistaken for a freshman more than once -- would tell me that "history is a seamless web." In other words, what goes around comes around.
As if to prove that the teacher is always right, I recently threaded my way back to my old stomping grounds, Georgetown Prep in Rockville, Maryland -- to reunite with Ochs, untangle the cat's cradle of his recently published book, Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871-1960, and give him a grade.
Dr. Ochs, chair of Prep's social studies department and still unpedagogically boyish looking, has woven an impressive historical web. More than 10 years in the making, Desegregating the Altar is a 500-page, compelling, and relentlessly footnoted tome which The New York Times described as "an exhaustive -- sometimes exhausting -- but sensitive examination of a specific instance of the mournful racism that afflicts Christians of all stripes."
This book makes it painfully clear that the Catholic Church hasn't always tendered good will to all -- particularly in late 19th-century America. Not even the St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, which sought to revolutionize the ecclesiastical apartheid system with missionaries from England sent to the United States after the Civil War, was free of indignities and stereotypes.
Ochs began working on the topic in the late '70s, shortly after he began teaching at Georgetown Prep. An avid student of history since the fourth grade, he was raised in Peoria, Illinois, and graduated in 1969 from St. Louis University with a bachelor's degree in history. His grades were sharp enough to earn him a tuition-free teacher's assistantship at the University of Maryland (where he got his master's degree in 1972 and his doctorate in 1985). When he arrived at Georgetown Prep -- ironically, a school without a great concentration of minorities -- his curiosity led him to the topic for his dissertation.
"I became interested in Catholic Church history by reading John Tracy Ellis' American Catholicism," says Ochs, 43, as students bustle down the hall. "In it he very briefly alluded to the church in Britain [where the Josephites originated] and mentioned the Josephites as the only group that focused on black priests.
"I noticed that their archives were in Baltimore, so I went there. The archivist, Peter Hogan, is a master collector of everything having to do with black Americana and black Catholicism. After I began reading at the archives, I asked [Peter] why there were so few black Josephites. He said he thought that was a story that needed to be investigated, and that it was a sensitive one. So he opened the archives to me."
OCHS TOOK A YEAR OFF, heading back to the University of Maryland to finish the dissertation. He completed the book in 1985, and the next year submitted it to the Louisiana State University Press, which held on to the manuscript for more than three years of editing and proofreading before giving the green light to publish.
Desegregating the Altar garnered good notices from Catholic newspapers and magazines as well as The New York Times. Most reviews point to Ochs as an "honest historian" who depicts the often shameful history -- "warts and all" -- of a putatively moral institution. Ochs isn't out for blood, though; he claims you can view racial attitudes in modern Christianity as "a glass half empty or half full," right down to the excommunication of George Stallings, Washington, DC's radical African-American priest.
"There has been a great deal of change," he says. "With 12 black bishops and more than 300 black priests, there has been considerable progress. On the other hand, Stallings is appealing to the frustrations of black Catholics who have endured a great deal at the hands of the church. The irony is that perhaps 25 years ago Stallings' move might have been more understandable than now, in light of the very significant progress and the fact that black men have been entering into more decision-making areas of the church. It's really unfortunate -- Stallings left the church by his own decoration. I think he touches a chord of resentment among black Catholics."
That, of course, begs a central question: Why should African Americans become Catholic at all? Why not Baptist or Episcopalian, denominations that have historically been more open to America's minorities?
Ochs, a layperson who lives in suburban DC with his wife and 7-year-old daughter, can't speak as an expert, but he carefully searches for the right Christian dogma.
"Black Catholics have operated in a prophetic role in the church," he says, carefully choosing the words. "Prophetic in calling the church to be what it proclaims itself to be, which is universal [and] open to all people.
"One of the things in the United States that we forget is that if we take the whole Western Hemisphere, a majority of people of African descent are Catholic. The world's largest Catholic country is Brazil, where many people are from Portuguese and African descent. And the church is growing in Africa. I think the ideals the church espouses -- that we all share a common brotherhood and sisterhood in God, that God is a common parent, the spiritual equality of all, etc.are the kind of ideals that have appeal to black Catholics, who have played an important, albeit ignored, role in the church.
"Their staying in the church has really been a remarkable statement of faith because they were discriminated against so egregiously. But black Catholics saw what the church was supposed to be."
The same way they saw what the Constitution stands for?
"Exactly. One might ask, Why would a black person want to be an American, given the legacy of discrimination? It's the same thing."
The bell rings, and Dr. Ochs is off to teach one of his five daily history classes. More scholar than racial provocateur -- although the right age, he was not an activist in the '60 -- he has no plans for the near future other than teaching the juniors at Prep and seeing what ripples his book makes on the waters of the archdiocese.
Despite the mediocre grades in history Ochs gave me, I have to mark Desegregating the Altar with a big red A -- indeed, it's a seamless web woven with the meticulousness of a spider, and an engaging lump of American history to infidels and believers alike. Memorize it. There will be a quiz afterward.
Mark G. Judge was a freelance writer living in Potomac, Maryland at the time this review appeared.
Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871-1960. By Stephen J. Ochs. Louisiana State University Press, 1991. $39.95 (cloth).
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