Black Catholic priests ordained in 2021 | Catholic National Register

NEW ORLEANS – “Do you want to be a priest? ”

The first time Ajani Gibson heard these words, he was 5 years old and was staring at his elementary school chapel where mass was offered. The gentleman who ran into Gibson that day looked puzzled.

“He said, ‘Do you want to be a priest?’ and I said, ‘Yes!’ Father Gibson told the register. At home he was the little boy who celebrated mass with stuffed animals and dressed up as a priest on Halloween.

Of course, Father Gibson said with a laugh that “Yes” turned to “No” or “Maybe”. And there were times he deliberately fought the idea of ​​a calling, even though he became more involved in altar service, lay ministry, and campus ministry in high school and college. . But in the priesthood, he told the Lord, he drew the line.

“All of my peers saw that this is where my life is headed,” he said. Finally at college, he said, “I’m literally running out of excuses.”

On June 6, Father Gibson celebrated his first Mass at his home parish, St. Peter Claver in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, and the congregation was absolutely jubilant.

After her first mass in her parish, one of the ladies of the parish approached and said: “The Lord has not abandoned you!

Other family members were more direct.

“My brother said it’s about time! he said.

Father Gibson is one of half a dozen Black Catholics this year who have followed the path laid out by Venerable Augustus Tolton, the country’s first publicly recognized Black Catholic priest.

Today there are approximately 250 African-American Catholic priests out of 3 million black Catholics, a reflection both of the heroic path forged by the venerable Tolton and also of the historical cost of racism (and the slowness in eradicating it. ) in the Catholic Church which has stifled many black vocations. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recounted how a white seminarian openly acclaiming the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. drove him out of seminary and temporarily out of the Catholic Church.

Brother Joséphite Cursey Calais, president of the National Association of Black Catholic Seminarians, told the Register that their association aims to both foster and support the pursuit by black Catholics of their vocation to the priesthood. Brother Calais said that they cite Venerable Augustus as an inspiration to their 40 or so seminarian members to persevere in their vocation.

“With the way he endured his vocation, we always have this feeling that he inspires us to always give more and to continue the good work that we are doing,” he said. “His faith prompts us not to give up.

Father Ajani’s mission is at St. Peter Claver Church. And one of the main benefits, he said, is that young black Catholics will have another example of a priest who is like them and who can relate to their struggles and help them consider the possibility that Jesus- Christ also calls them to the priesthood.

The keys to vocation

Father Raney Johnson remembers the first time he was asked about a vocation. A nun – in fact, a member of the religious order of Venerable Henriette DeLille, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary – had started working at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Parish School in Shreveport, Louisiana. , while he was in seventh grade. .

“She asked me if I had ever thought about becoming a priest,” he said. “And that’s when I really started to think about it.”

In high school, Father Johnson said he was inspired by Saint John Bosco and began to discern a vocation for Salesians.

“In the end, that didn’t happen,” he said. But in college, Father Johnson said, “I started to hear the call again, and after my sophomore year, that’s when I first applied to seminary.

Father Johnson explained that the adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary and the daily Mass really nourished his vocation through the seminary.

Finally, he says, the experience of parish ministry alongside the parish priest, through all the ins and outs of parish life, a month before his diaconal ordination, solidified his discernment.

“That’s when it all really clicked,” he said.

Father Johnson was ordained on June 5 and ministered at St. Mary of the Pines Catholic Church in Shreveport.

“I can’t wait to be in the parish to help evangelize the culture and be able to celebrate Mass and hear confessions,” he said.

When God has different plans

Father Guy Dormevil dreamed of serving the Church as a permanent deacon. But his unusual vocational journey to the priesthood shows how God sometimes has different plans.

“The priesthood has shown me that God has a will for you and that He submits to God,” he said.

When he began his vocational discernment in the diaconate, Father Dormevil was married and the father of two children. After 29 years of marriage, his wife and lifelong sweetheart, Margalie, died of cancer in 2015. But he said the experience of marriage – a life of sacrifice and learning humility before a other person – informs their priesthood.

“In marriage, you have to learn to give yourself,” he said. Father Dormevil said the sacrament of marriage is contrary to what many people are doing today, where they “do not seek to give, but seek what you can get.”

“I think all of these qualities are useful,” he said, saying that experience had taught him that a priest’s relationship with his parish should “not be to rule over them, but to be one family in Christ “.

Father Dormevil also mentioned the experience of his own family as a formator in his vocation.

“My father always wanted his first son to be a priest and his daughter to be a religious,” he said. His father served as a sacristan for 40 years, and although his first son did not become a priest, Father Dormevil said he believed his father’s prayers played a role in his own vocation.

His sister never became a nun, but she helped raise the family’s 15 children after their mother died, and he calls her “the Jesus of the family.”

“This sister sacrificed her whole life for the well-being of the family,” he said. And at 17, he started helping his sister raise her other siblings.

“I have been a father figure my whole life,” he said.

In a moving homily at Father Dormevil’s ordination on June 12, Bishop Frank Caggiano of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, spoke of Father Dormevil’s experience of fatherhood and the number of lives his testimony touched.

“And now the Lord will ask you to put your hand to the plow and, in this very troubled and difficult world, to lead the people of God as one of his fathers, as his priest.”

Train the next generation

More work needs to be done to encourage more black Catholic men to answer the call as Venerable Augustus Tolton did to follow Jesus Christ into his sacred priesthood and to support them on their journey.

Father Gibson told the Register that even today the seminary culture can have an “assimilation” mentality. More needs to be done to recognize “the gifts that African Americans bring” to the Catholic Church. And embracing the black tradition within the Catholic Church, he said, would be a greater testimony to the universality of the Church.

“We cannot lose our diversity because of uniformity,” said the priest, echoing points made by Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul II. The holy pontiff even spoke eloquently during his 1987 visit to New Orleans about the critical importance of the gifts of black Catholics to the entire Catholic Church.

“The Holy Father asked for this,” he said, “and the Church called him from the start. ”