TY - JOUR
T1 - "Racial discrimination can in no way be justified"
T2 - The Vatican and Desegregation in the South, 1946-1968
AU - Newman, Mark
N1 - Funding Information:
Subsequent work has focussed more on the impact of the Vatican's interest in African Americans on northern Catholicism. John T. McGreevy's study of Catholics and race in the twentieth-century urban North acknowledges Vatican exhortations to American prelates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address racial injustice and commit more resources to evangelizing African Americans. McGreevy observes that after World War I African American and liberal white Catholics interpreted papal exhortations, aimed mostly at China and Africa, for the development and acceptance of an indigenous clergy as relevant for the United States, where few seminaries admitted any African Americans, and black clergy were scarce. “Such hopes,” McGreevy writes, “were supported by the publication of articles on African-American Catholics in the Vatican newspaper and support from the apostolic delegate,” but often largely dashed by reluctant bishops. Despite the church's hierarchical structure, Rome allowed prelates virtual autonomy, which often enabled them to exercise discretion when the Vatican adopted approaches or positions with which they disagreed or felt unready to adopt and implement.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - Although the Vatican pragmatically accepted the establishment of segregated Catholic institutions in the Jim Crow South during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, its condemnation of Nazi and fascist racism and espousal of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ rejected racial distinctions. This article argues that Rome's postwar transnational interest in countering international communism and appealing to the global South also encouraged its support for racial equality, integration and the civil rights movement, and denial of religious legitimacy to segregationists. Yet Catholic desegregation in the South was largely token and one-sided, and closed many black institutions.
AB - Although the Vatican pragmatically accepted the establishment of segregated Catholic institutions in the Jim Crow South during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, its condemnation of Nazi and fascist racism and espousal of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ rejected racial distinctions. This article argues that Rome's postwar transnational interest in countering international communism and appealing to the global South also encouraged its support for racial equality, integration and the civil rights movement, and denial of religious legitimacy to segregationists. Yet Catholic desegregation in the South was largely token and one-sided, and closed many black institutions.
U2 - 10.1017/S0021875822000135
DO - 10.1017/S0021875822000135
M3 - Article
SN - 0021-8758
VL - 56
SP - 665
EP - 698
JO - Journal of American Studies
JF - Journal of American Studies
IS - 5
ER -