Word: priesting
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...Washington Catholics, Stallings is a figure to reckon with. During a twelve-year assignment, the 41-year-old priest built up a black parish from 200 to 2,000 families. Last year Hickey appointed him director of the archdiocese's evangelism program. Heedless of Hickey's stern warnings, Stallings is determined to celebrate Mass for his Imani (Swahili for faith) Temple, which will meet temporarily in a chapel at Howard University. How many of the archdiocese's 80,000 black parishioners will enlist in this self-made Catholicism? Jacqueline Wilson, who directs the Washington archdiocesan office for black Catholics, thinks...
Nowhere are the problems more evident than in Detroit and Washington, two archdioceses where the church is confronting sharp dissatisfaction among blacks. In Washington, a fiery, articulate black priest named George A. Stallings Jr., fed up with the church's treatment of blacks, plans to defy James Cardinal Hickey this week by inaugurating his own independent African- American Catholic Congregation. In Detroit, black resentment is aimed at Edmund Cardinal Szoka, who last week finally shut down 21 of the city's 114 parishes, mostly in black neighborhoods, with nine others soon to follow. The action came despite angry protests...
According to church law, only the diocesan bishop can authorize a new parish or decide where priests work. In a toughly worded response to Stallings' challenge two weeks ago, Hickey threatened to notify all U.S. bishops that the renegade priest was no longer in good standing and should henceforth be forbidden to speak at any Catholic institution in the U.S. Stallings is unapologetic. "I have been caught up in the spirit of destiny," says the rebel priest. "I know I am breaking canon law. But to stir up the conscience of a nation, I'll do it. When laws control...
...compelled to take drastic action, in part because of Detroit's ruinous population decline. The city's churches, however, are also dying because they have failed to enlist any significant numbers of blacks when white ethnics began moving out of their neighborhoods. Says the Rev. Norman Thomas, a white priest who opposes the closings: "The church has not done an adequate job of being a church in the city, and that includes attracting blacks...
Nothing had changed, except the birth of hope. Its harbinger is a frail, shy Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A charismatic preacher of liberation theology, Aristide was spokesman for Ti Legliz -- the "Little Church" of the slums, in contrast to the grand official church of Haiti's temporizing bishops and its French-speaking "mulatto elite." Yet even Aristide ends as one more victim of Haiti's misery. Army goons burn his church, murdering many of his congregants, and Aristide eventually becomes a priest sans pulpit when the Salesians dismiss him for being too political...