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UTMB chaplain recalls involvement in desegregation of Louisiana parishes
By John Koloen
JAN. 12, 2005--Back in 1955, a young Catholic priest planned to celebrate Mass in a small town southeast of New Orleans. It was a routine event. Priests often visited outlying churches to celebrate Mass, in this case a small chapel off the highway in a place called Jesuit Bend. Little did the priest imagine as he set out for this wide spot in the road that he would end the day embroiled in the battle over desegregation and the event documented on the pages of the New York Times.
What happened to the Rev. Gerald Lewis, a UTMB chaplain since 1996, was as unexpected on that first Sunday of October, 1955, as what happened two months later in Montgomery, Ala., when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white man. Yet it was all part of the same milieu. The Catholic Church had committed to integrating its parishes, and the incident at Jesuit Bend became a test of the church’s resolve.
Lewis, who was ordained in 1952, had celebrated Mass many times. However, he’d spent most of his time since his ordination as an educator.
“As a teacher you are appointed to a parish on weekends to help with Mass,” Lewis said. “That weekend I was in Belle Chasse. There was nothing special about it except the parish was mixed black and white and I was going to say Mass to the people there.”
“I drove from Belle Chasse to Jesuit Bend for Mass at 8 o’clock. It took about 10 minutes to get there,” he said. “The church is a distance off the highway and has a wide open space in front. When I got there, I saw a police car blocking the entrance. I didn’t try to park there. I went far enough down to not block the entrance and walked to the church. When I got to the entrance, a policeman and another man met me there.”
The men had an unexpected greeting for Lewis.
“The policeman said, ‘We know you come here to preach the word of God, but we can’t have a black man saying Mass to white people.’” Those words set off a chain of events that went well beyond Jesuit Bend.
Not surprisingly, the “welcoming committee” upset Father Lewis. “You just feel insulted,” he said. “They were very respectful and they said they would talk with the bishop.”
If the men expected a sympathetic ear from the bishop, they were disappointed. According to the New York Times article, headlined “Negro Priest Barred; Mission is Rebuked,” Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel suspended services at Jesuit Bend. He also reduced from three to two the number of Masses celebrated at Belle Chasse.
“The bishop issued an interdiction on them (the congregation at Jesuit Bend),” Lewis said. “What this means is that no priest can perform any activity there. You basically close the thing down.”
Lewis never got to celebrate Mass at Jesuit Bend. By 10 a.m. he was celebrating Mass at a church in Myrtle Grove, a few miles south of Jesuit Bend. Like Jesuit Bend, the congregation at Myrtle Grove was a mixture of blacks and whites. The difference was that Lewis was welcomed at Myrtle Grove. “They hadn’t heard about what happened at Jesuit Bend,” he said. “I said Mass for them. When I went there nothing happened.”
At the time, Lewis said he did not know the names of the men who met him at the Jesuit Bend church. He now believes one of them was Leander Perez, a segregationist who ran Plaquemines Parish, La., like a personal kingdom until his death in 1969. Jesuit Bend, Myrtle Grove, and Belle Chasse are all in Plaquemines Parish.
In 1962, Archbishop Rummel excommunicated Perez from the church for his support of segregation and defiance of the Church’s position on integration. One of those acts of defiance occurred in Jesuit Bend.