You’d Have To Be A Saint

The struggle to be a Catholic Black American

(Statue at the Peter Claver School, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Photo: Suzanne Spellen)

African Americans have been Catholics since Catholics have been in the Americas, although certainly not sitting as equals in the pews or rising throught the Church heirarchy. I was raised as a Catholic, from an African American family that was Catholic on my father’…