A Negro Priest

When the priest arrived at Jesuits Bend,* about 15 miles south of New Orleans, he found a delegation of parishioners waiting for him at the mission chapel. "They were very polite," the Rev. Gerald Lewis, 31, said later. "They informed me that a Negro could not say Mass for a white congregation."

New Orleans' 79-year-old Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel, a famed enemy of segregation (three years ago he banned Jim Crow benches in New Orleans' Catholic churches), met the issue head-on but gently. Instead of cutting off the congregation from all spiritual ministrations, he merely suspended services at the mission in Jesuits Bend and reduced services at two others at nearby Belle Chasse and Myrtle Grove. In a letter addressed to the congregations, the archbishop said that the incident violated "the obligations of reverence and devotion which Catholics owe to every priest of God . . .

"Furthermore, every human being, regardless of race, color or nationality, is created after the image and likeness of God . . . and destined one day to enjoy the company of the angels and saints in the awesome presence of the All High God ...

"Because the shortage of priests is such that we cannot replace the reverend father in question, [the suspension will stay in force] until the members of these communities express their willingness to accept . . . whatever priest or priests we find it possible to send them."

*Probably so named because the Jesuit Order once owned land at a nearby bend in the Mississippi River.

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